Evaluating the effectiveness of China’s nation branding with data from social media

In the past few decades, the rise of China has become the theme of heated debates, the central question of which is whether China will rise peacefully or as a “threat.” Faced with various speculations and predictions about China’s possible future course of action, Chinese political leaders and eminent scholars began engaging in the making and projecting of China’s soft power as well as a series of nation-branding campaigns. In order to study and evaluate the effectiveness of China’s nation-branding campaigns as well as how well the general public receives them, we looked into the perspectives and attitudes of the populace to find out their attitudes toward China’s national image. In this article, we intend to scrutinize the public opinions toward China as reflected by the questions and answers on social media (quora.com in this case), using content analysis. As the findings show, the ranking of effectiveness of the different aspects of China’s nation branding is as follows: (1) history, (2) place, (3) language, (4) political and economic systems, (5) culture, (6) people, (7) infrastructure, and (8) social institution. Based on the results of the study, a model for evaluating the success or effectiveness of nation-branding campaigns was proposed.