This research report measures changes in China's public diplomacy after a May 2021 collective study session of the Chinese Communist Party Politburo. The session examined the country's global communications strategy and fuelled speculation about what might change in China's external communications, particularly with regard to its “wolf warrior” diplomats. Combining hand-coding and quantitative text analysis, we develop and validate a measure of “wolf warrior diplomacy” rhetoric and apply it to over 200,000 tweets from nearly 200 institutional, media and diplomatic Twitter accounts. Using a difference-in-difference research design, we evaluate if the session led to a noticeable change in the tweets of diplomats based in OECD countries. After the announcement, PRC diplomats in the OECD moderated their tweets in comparison to non-OECD diplomats, but we do not detect a major re-orientation of PRC communication strategies. These findings have relevance for scholars of Chinese foreign policy, nationalism and public diplomacy.

Militaries are sustained by public money that is diverted away from other domestic ends. How the public react to the “guns-versus-butter” trade-off is thus an important question in understanding the microfoundations of Chinese military power. However, there are few studies on public attitudes towards military spending in China, whose rising power has been a grave concern to many policymakers around the world. We fielded a national online survey to investigate the nature of public support for military spending in China. We find that Chinese citizens support military spending in the abstract, but their support diminishes when considered alongside other domestic spending priorities. We also find that public support for military spending coexists surprisingly with anti-war sentiments and a significant strain of isolationism. In addition, while the conventional wisdom suggests that nationalism moves a state towards bellicosity and war, we find that Chinese citizens with a stronger sense of national pride report stronger anti-war sentiments than other citizens.

Sceptics query China's economic and political ability to realize its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Less attention has been paid to BRI's implications for one of the defining features of China's foreign policy: low engagement in areas beyond its traditional sphere of influence. The Middle East is such a case. Addressing this issue, the article explores the mutual impact of China's low political involvement in the Middle East and BRI's realization. Distinguishing cross-border connectivity projects from other BRI-associated activities, the article examines the challenges to executing BRI-related projects in Israel. It finds that realizing connectivity projects – the essence of the BRI vision – will require China to increase its regional engagement, a shift that it has so far avoided.

Most analyses of China's foreign and security policies treat China as a unitary actor, assuming a cohesive grand strategy articulated by Beijing. I challenge this conventional wisdom, showing how Chinese provinces can affect the formulation and implementation of foreign policy. This contributes to existing research on the role of subnational actors in China, which has focused on how they shape domestic and economic policies. Using Hainan and Yunnan as case studies, I identify three mechanisms of provincial influence – trailblazing, carpetbagging, and resisting – and illustrate them with examples of key provincial policies. This analysis provides a more nuanced argument than is commonly found in international relations for the motivations behind evolving and increasingly activist Chinese foreign policy. It also has important policy implications for understanding and responding to Chinese behaviour, in the South China Sea and beyond.