Soft or strong? Friendly or aggressive? Responsible or reckless? How does China show its stance to the world through its Ministry of Foreign Affairs? As a country with the world’s most population and third land area, China always gains much attention from the rest countries. From the beginning of 2021, a pile of questions has been thrown to China.
Facing praise or criticism, how would the Ministry of Foreign Affairs react to all the comments? Let’s take a look at the regular press conferences in March and listen to the spokespersons’ speech.
Above depicts the two-pole sentiment of the spokespersons’ original Chinese answers from two thirds of the press conferences in March. It calculates the percentage of both positive and negative terms on the whole speech. In general, we can see that the use of pure sentiment terms is quite limited, only taking up about 10% of the whole speech content. Comparatively, the sentiment skews to positive. This positive inclination corresponds to the cautiousness of the diplomatic language and reflects the official gentleness towards the media.
If we take a closer look of the peak values of the negative, we may see what usually provoked China’s strong stance. For instance, on 18th March, the day before the high-level Alaska talks, most of the questions focused on the tensed external relations. When asked about the hate-related incidents on Asian in the US, Mr. Zhao Lijian, Deputy Director-Generals of The Information Department, said “such despicable actions, born out of senseless discrimination, make us furious and sad” and appeals the US to take concrete steps to address its own racism problems.
COVID-19 and Hong Kong are also frequently asked by many medias. Fig. 2 extracts answers related to these two topics and calculate the sentiment ratio.
As the following chart shows, the spokespersons’ words about the pandemic and Hong Kong issue are mild, containing very little emotional content. The officials tend to emphasize the achievement and progress of China and expectation of a better future. Take a reply on 12thMarch as an example, Mr. Zhao appraised on China-Russia cooperation on fighting COVID and stated that China is willing to “offer Chinese and Russian wisdom into the building of a global community of health for all”.
Apart from the regular conferences, China’s attitude on the high-level Alaska talk has been highly discussed recently. In the talks, China and US exchanged sharp rebukes. The US side questioned China on Xinjiang, Taiwan, cyber-attacks and economic coercion of their allies. Fig. compares different emotion-related terms.
Probably due to the ill-tempered atmosphere in the conversations, the sentiment terms reach about 20% of the official’s speech. Compared with the regular conferences, this ratio is considerably high. Also, according to Fig. 3 and 4, we can see that the positive emotion takes up a large area within all sentiment terms. Both of the two countries shown a lot of trust, joy and anticipation.
However, as the talks are considered to be unusually undiplomatic by some critics, it is never wise to underestimate the tensity between US and China, or ignore any other potential conflicts that lie in the daily diplomatic language.