Research on the Construction Effects of China’s National Image through International Weak Communication from the Perspective of Articulation Theory

Abstract

At present, China’s external communication is centered on the grand narrative led by the official government. Although it can accurately convey political signals, it ignores multiple dimensions such as economy, culture and society, which leads to the cognitive bias and discourse resistance of foreign people to China. The visa-free policy promotes people-to-people exchanges, brings the trend of “China tourism”, and produces a large number of “weak communication” phenomena based on personal experience, which has become a new way for foreign people to perceive China.Under the framework of joint theory, this study explores how international weak communication influences the construction of China’s national image through cross-cultural interaction. Qualitative research methods were adopted, focusing on South Korean tourists to China and overseas users who turned to XiaoHongshu after TikTok Ban, and high interaction volume bloggers and comment users were screened through platforms such as Instagram and Xiaohongshu. Combined with online interview and content analysis, this paper extracts the “joint” feature of weak communication and analyzes its influence mechanism on Chinese image cognition. This study finds that the folk authenticity of weak communication behavior can easily stimulate people’s emotional resonance and identification with China’s national image, which can effectively make up for the limitations of official communication.The innovation is to explore the mechanism of international weak communication, the process of connecting with local culture, and the breakthrough effect on the pattern of traditional media publicity from the perspective of engagement theory.