Fixing the narrative: China’s strategic messaging during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in China, significantly damaged China’s global image and became highly politicized in the United States, where Republicans expressed more negative views of China than Democrats. This study examines China’s strategic communication as image repair by analyzing image repair strategies used on the Chinese Embassy in U.S. Twitter (X) account. Using a sequential, two-phase quantitative design, it combines a content analysis of the Embassy tweets posted between December 2019 and May 2020 with a survey experiment testing the effects of these strategies on American public opinion. Image repair strategies had no significant main effects on perceptions of China. Political ideology, however, consistently shaped evaluations, though in different directions across the two outcomes. As predicted, conservatives held China more responsible for the outbreak than liberals, but contrary to expectations, they evaluated China’s pandemic response more favorably. Strategy effects also varied by ideology. Minimization elicited more positive evaluations from conservatives than liberals, whereas among liberals, corrective action produced more favorable evaluations than minimization. This study advances research on international crisis communication and image repair by demonstrating how audience characteristics shape message effectiveness and offers practical insights into the challenges and opportunities of digital diplomacy during global crises.