The very first research findings produced within the PubDiplo project were presented on 5 June 2026 at the Annual Conference of the International Communication Association in Cape Town. Entitled Culturally Driven Reputation Building? A Study of the Communication Strategies of French Cultural and Diplomatic Institutions on Weibo, the study was led by Zhao Alexandre Huang of Université Gustave Eiffel.
The research examines how French cultural, educational and diplomatic institutions communicate France’s image to Chinese publics through Weibo. Its central premise is that France’s image on Chinese digital platforms does not simply reflect pre-existing cultural resources. Rather, it is continuously reconstructed through platform conventions, localized communication practices, institutional strategies and inter-organizational circulation.
To investigate this process, the study conceptualizes cultural promotion as a form of reputation building. Drawing on Buhmann and Ingenhoff (2015)’s 4D country reputation model, it analyzes how French institutions construct four dimensions of national image: functionality, normativity, aesthetics and sympathy.
The research team collected 177,188 posts published by 43 Weibo-verified French institutional accounts, covering diplomacy, higher education, culture, the arts, tourism and sport. The corpus includes posts published from the launch of each account through April 2026. At this stage of the project, a 2% stratified sample was selected, resulting in 3,369 codable posts. The analysis combines manual content coding, topic modelling and repost network analysis. Intercoder reliability was above 0.8 for all four reputation dimensions.
The preliminary findings show that France’s image on Weibo is primarily constructed through aesthetic attraction, emotional proximity and practical accessibility. Aesthetics is the dominant dimension, appearing in almost 69% of the sampled posts, while sympathy appears in approximately two-thirds of the corpus. Functionality is also significant, whereas normativity remains comparatively marginal. The prominence of aesthetics, however, cannot be reduced to conventional representations of French high culture. Sport emerged as the largest thematic category within this dimension, ahead of museums, cultural heritage, tourism and lifestyle. Football, tennis and major sporting events enable French institutions to transform cultural visibility into shared experiences structured around competition, celebration and collective viewing. The functionality dimension is driven primarily by higher education, study-abroad guidance and student services. Through information about universities, scholarships, application procedures and student life, France is presented less as an abstract international power than as an accessible educational destination.
Normative communication is less frequent and rarely takes the form of generalized value promotion. Instead, normative claims are anchored in specific public issues, particularly environmental protection, sustainable development, multilateral cooperation and international order.
The repost network analysis further reveals that French digital public diplomacy on Weibo operates through a differentiated institutional ecosystem. Education-related accounts sustain routine circulation, diplomatic accounts connect different sectors, and cultural and sports institutions supply highly visible and emotionally engaging content that can be amplified across the network.
These initial findings suggest that digital public diplomacy should be understood as a process of platformized reputation building. National images are shaped not only through institutional messages, but also through platform-specific formats, emotional engagement and inter-institutional circulation.
To cite the work :
Huang, Z. A., Zhu, M., & Li, X. (2026, June 5). Culturally Driven Reputation Building? A Longitude Study of the Communication Strategies of French Cultural and Diplomatic Institutions on Weibo. Digital Diplomacy, Institutions, and Platform Constraints. 76th Annual ICA Conference – Communication and Inequalities in Context, Cape Town, South Africa.
Reference:
Buhmann, A., & Ingenhoff, D. (2015). The 4D Model of the country image: An integrative approach from the perspective of communication management. International Communication Gazette, 77(1), 102–124. https://doi.org/10.1177/1748048514556986
PubDiplo 