China's Twitter Diplomacy in Germany: Practices, Reactions, and Discrepancies

China's digital public diplomacy on social media and the ways in which Chinese diplomats communicate have received international attention and generated academic interest. As the first study to conduct country-specific investigation on how Chinese diplomats in Germany practice digital public diplomacy on Twitter, this article examines their communication strategies based on Twitter data collected from verified accounts of Chinese diplomats in Germany during the part of the pandemic from January 2020 to February 2021. The study also identifies discrepancies between the actual practices of China's Twitter diplomacy in Germany and media perception of China's Twitter diplomacy represented by relevant news articles from two German mainstream newspapers, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and the Suddeutsche Zeitung in 2020. The discrepancies, the author claims, can be attributed to the process of othering China, i.e. framing China as the other, that eventually compromises the effectiveness of China's communication strategies. Seeing China's Twitter diplomacy as network-centric public diplomacy with Chinese characteristics, this article depicts the ways in which the case of Germany contributes to the understanding of the global communication network of China's public diplomacy on Twitter by showing its country-specific communication strategies.