Knowing our air from them: Exploring perception of foreign media affinity,dependency and accessibility as activators for Chinese publics

Abstract

This study explores the effect of foreign media on publics’ psychological activeness during a foreign media–spurred national problem: air pollution in China. Building on theories of media diplomacy and public relations, it finds that affinity with foreign media significantly activates Chinese publics to engage communication actions against air pollution, as it relieves publics’ constraint recognition. Dependency on foreign media also mediates such an effect. Moreover, the results show that perceived accessibility of foreign media heightens such mediation, such that when access to foreign media is low, the direct activation effect of foreign media vaporizes.

Keywords

Foreign media hot-issue publics international public relations public diplomacy situational theory of problem solving

To extend national values and policies preferences beyond borders, one of the main taxonomies of public diplomacy is media diplomacy (Cull, 2008; Gilboa, 2008): that is to persuade and activate publics on an international and transnational scale through globalized media and news networks (Snow and Taylor, 2008).

Real-world cases are also abundant: RT’s popularity as a foreign-based multiplatform news provider has caught the attention of US intelligence agencies, which accused RT for being manipulative and misinforming US audiences during the election period (Office of the Director of National Intelligence, 2017). Other cases also remind scholars about the fierceness of competition in media diplomacy, such as the US’ Alhurra satellite TV channel project in the Middle East countering Al Jazeera (Dabbous and Nasser, 2009; Douai, 2009).

However, one common analytical problem of these case descriptions, as well as the study of public diplomacy in general, is that the outcome of media diplomacy is often difficult to measure (Pahlavi, 2007; Snow and Taylor, 2008). In some studies, evaluations were made about the transmission of agendas or news frames on a shorter term, but not on people (Kampf et al., 2015). Studies that measure audiences’ psychological changes as a result of media diplomacy or international broadcasting, in turn, often tackle with long-term cultivation effects (Lam, 2007; Rivas, 2015). The shortcoming is that short-term, issue-specific media diplomacy cases have been less examined, especially in terms of how they influenced foreign publics psychologically.

This study aims to fill this gap by studying (1) the Chinese public’s relationship with foreign media as predictors of their psychological activeness against air pollution, which was brought to the attention of the Chinese public by the US embassy in 2009; (2) which types of psychological activeness, in the theoretical framework of public relations, are influenced by publics’ relationship with foreign media; and (3) in the Chinese context where access to foreign media is restricted, whether perception of foreign media accessibility moderates the effect of foreign media on the Chinese public’s psychological activeness.

Literature review

Foreign coverage of air pollution in China

In 2009, the US embassy in Beijing, China, started to publish air quality data on a daily basis on its Twitter account, which was then accessible in China (Kay et al., 2015). The information was also synced on its Sino Weibo (Chinese version of Twitter) official account. The publication of its monitoring data of air quality received wide attention among Chinese netizens and elicited widespread public response (Duan and Takahashi, 2017).

The data not only introduced the Chinese public to a new concept, PM_2.5 (i.e. particulate matter 2.5 micrometres or less in diameter) as an index of air quality, it also turned Chinese public opinion towards responsibility attribution with regard to the problem. Although Twitter became less accessible in China since 2009, foreign news coverage and public opinion on Chinese social media continued to pressure Chinese environmental governance authorities. In 2012, the relevant Chinese authorities introduced new air quality standards, and this was regarded as a ‘victory for Chinese microbloggers’ (Kay et al., 2015: 351).

From the perspective of the Chinese authorities, the US embassy’s publication of air quality data to the Chinese public was not diplomatically aligned with the spirit of the Vienna Convention, and it also ‘contravenes relevant environmental protection rules’. In as early as 2009, immediately after the publication of the data on Twitter and the foreign media’s coverage of the issue, Chinese diplomatic bodies complained to their US counterparts that air quality information disseminated in such a way would ‘confuse the Chinese public’ (Branigan, 2012).

Although the original reason for the publication of the data by the US embassy has been debated, this case is a good example of how a foreign embassy, with the power of Twitter and other foreign media’s news coverage, was able to activate the domestic public in China. The current study aims to explore the relationship between the Chinese publics and foreign media, their perceived access to foreign media and psychological activeness of communicating about the air pollution problem.

Psychological activeness and hot-issue publics

Public diplomacy and the situational theory of publics

States have a variety of goals in public diplomacy, varying from incitation of foreign publics to building benign relationships with them (Avgerinos, 2009; Snow and Taylor, 2008). No matter what the aim of a public diplomacy campaign, publics are a key factor in the process of reaching that objective (Golan, 2013; Golan et al., 2015). The segmentation of publics was first proposed by Grunig (1997) with the situational theory of publics (STP). He categorized publics according to their activeness into four types: non-publics, latent publics, aware publics and active publics.

The STP was later mooted as a new theory of publics by Kim and Grunig (2011) to better fit publics’ behaviour patterns. The new theory, the situational theory of problem solving (STOPS), explains how publics come up with perceptive, cognitive and motivational psychological antecedents, which give rise to their communicative actions against a common problem (Kim, 2006).

This typology provides a method of categorizing the publics’ active versus passive communicative behaviours and prioritizing certain strategies of public diplomacy (Grunig, 1993). The obvious examples for this are the Arab Spring revolutions and the Colour revolutions in the mid-1990s: these public diplomacy campaigns activated local publics’ awareness and behaviours in favour of ‘Western Democracy’ (Bruns et al., 2013; Khondker, 2011; Way, 2008). The American embassy’s reports about air quality in Beijing inspired millions of unaware Chinese citizens to discuss air pollution on social media, placing pressure on national environmental policies in the public discourse (Duan and Takahashi, 2017).

Media diplomacy and STOPS

Given the thematical focus of the current article, which is to examine foreign media’s activation of the Chinese public about air pollution, this type of short-term, issue-specific media diplomacy could be interpreted in the framework of the STOPS.

First, air pollution, or the pan-social concern about air quality in China, can be largely attributed to the US embassy’s reporting of Beijing’s air quality, which started as early as August 2008. As per the Chinese authorities, the publication of the air quality indexes on Twitter and Chinese social media platforms caused ‘confusion’ among the Chinese public because it provided ‘conflictual’ information against Beijing’s official reports (Branigan, 2012). It is then reasonable to hypothesize that foreign news reports about air pollution could make the issue appear as a problem for the Chinese public.

Second, the case also poses the Chinese authorities, including those in charge of environmental protection and city administration, as the organizations that should respond to this problem. The STOPS model, as well as its antecedent public relations models, have been tested and referenced in the context of public administration (Kim et al., 2012) or public diplomacy (Tam and Kim, 2017) and shown satisfactory explanatory results.

The publication of Beijing’s air quality data by the US embassy on Twitter was in 2008, one year before Twitter and other Western media’s accessibility was restricted in China. If one assumes that the Chinese public accessed these news stories about air pollution from Western media, then the case could be further explained by the hot-issue publics literature, which specifically explains the activation of publics by media coverage – and in the context of this study, by foreign media coverage as a format of media diplomacy.

Nowadays, although access to Western media has been policy-wise restricted in mainland China, a considerable number of people, especially those who live in metropolitan areas, still access foreign media on different platforms through virtual private networks (VPNs) or other channels. Chinese mainland media also cite or quote from restricted foreign media like CNN or The Wall Street Journal (Fung et al., 2017).

Different to long-term relationships between an organization and its different publics, hot-issue publics often emerge on a short-term basis, and their activeness is usually spurred by media coverage on an emerging case which involves scandals, disasters or national problems (Kim et al., 2012: 151). This fits exactly into the scenario of foreign media’s coverage about air pollution in China.

Antecedents of psychological activeness

Hot-issue publics’ activeness was conceptualized and measured in the STOPS model with a series of indicators of communicative actions about/against the problem in question. Kim and Grunig (2011) also conceptualized that publics would form perceptive, cognitive and motivational antecedents psychologically before they actually engaged in communicative actions, that is, problem recognition, involvement recognition, constraint recognition and referent criterion.

Kim and Grunig (2011) explained problem recognition as the publics’ recognition of a cognitive problem: ‘one’s perception that something is missing and there is no immediate applicable solutions to it’ (p. 11). Involvement recognition was defined as ‘a perceived connection between the self and a problematic situation’ (p. 149). Constraint recognition was defined as occurring when ‘people perceive that there are obstacles in a situation that limit their ability to do anything about the situation’ (Grunig, 1997: 10). Referent criterion represents a combination of people’s relevant experiences from the past in order to solve the problem; given the fact that air pollution was a relatively new concept for the Chinese public at that time, and that a referent criterion has not been stable as an antecedent predictor in public diplomacy studies, this study does not measure referent criterion as a psychological antecedent.

Foreign media affinity and dependency as cross-situational activators

Past studies on hot-issue publics have rarely investigated foreign media coverage as a different media behaviour in contrast to media-related communicative action in general. Actually, studies on foreign media have shown that consumption and perception of foreign media as a credible source significantly influences publics’ social and political attitudes and behaviours (Disdier et al., 2010; Golan and Kiousis, 2010; Willnat et al., 1997). In some cases, foreign media is also contrasted with domestic media for different effects (Liu, 2012; Zhu and He, 2002).

The current literature on hot-issue publics’ behaviour has shown empirical evidence only about the relationship between individual traits and psychological, problem-solving activeness among publics. For example, Chen et al. (2017) studied how government trust influenced psychological antecedents, and found that Koreans’ trust in their government would reduce their problem recognition about the import of US beef, while giving rise to constraint recognition and referent criterion. In other words, government trust was a suppressor of psychological activeness for problem solving against the import of US beef. In another study of the same issue, Kim et al. (2012) studied how political interest and political activist behaviour could have activating effects over publics.

While these studies did not cover a media diplomacy phenomenon, the literature nevertheless conceptualizes factors influencing psychological antecedents as cross-situational individual traits. When it comes to foreign media coverage, a cross-situational trait would be publics’ relationship with foreign media. Wanta and Hu (1994) used a conceptualization of media reliance to describe publics’ relationship with the media in general. Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur (1976) conceptualized and operationalized audiences’ relationship with media as individual-level media system dependency.

While media reliance and individual-level media system dependency could be direct modifiers of psychological antecedents, Wanta and Hu (1994), as well as other scholars (e.g. Messing and Westwood, 2014), have also found that publics’ affinity with media could also be a type of relationship with media. Wanta and Hu (1994) further illustrated that media affinity influences media reliance positively in their structural equation model. Thus, it is possible that reliance or dependency on media mediates the effect of media affinity on publics’ activeness against a social/national problem.

With the assumption that foreign media have distinct, if not conflicting, content as compared to domestic media (Rohn, 2009), it is arguable that publics that have a closer relationship with foreign media would have different psychological activeness towards air pollution. Also, going with the assumption that foreign media’s coverage of air pollution in China has been mainly negative (Kay et al., 2015), it is arguable that the Chinese public that is closer to foreign media could have been more active. In earlier studies, publics’ psychological activeness was found to be influenced in different ways by cross-situational traits (Chen et al., 2017; Kim et al., 2012), some by cutting short constraint recognition, and some by increasing problem recognition. Given the distinct activation routes showed in earlier studies, the current study proposes its first three hypotheses and first three mediation path models (Figure 1):

H1. Chinese publics’ dependency on foreign media significantly influences their psychological antecedents of communicative action against air pollution.

H1A. Dependency positively influences their problem recognition.

H1B. Dependency positively influences their involvement recognition.

H1C. Dependency negatively influences their constraint recognition.

H2. Chinese publics’ affinity with foreign media significantly influences their psychological antecedents of communicative action against air pollution (direct effect).

H2A. Affinity positively influences their problem recognition.

H2B. Affinity positively influences their involvement recognition.

H2C. Affinity negatively influences their constraint recognition.

H3. Chinese publics’ dependency on foreign media significantly mediates the effect of affinity with foreign media on their psychological antecedents (indirect effect).

Perception of access to foreign media as moderator

Although theory suggests that media affinity and dependency would activate hot-issue publics, the specific case of transnational activation in media diplomacy demands that this study take into consideration accessibility of foreign media. As discussed earlier, studies on media diplomacy and international broadcasting have shown that foreign media had distinct content and effect from domestic media (Lim, 2011). During the Arab Spring and the 2016 US presidential election, foreign media played an important role in activating local publics (Kern, 2011).

This caused governments around the world to pay special attention to foreign media, and some of them started to restrict domestic publics’ access to foreign media content (Lim, 2011). For example, the Chinese public may have to make more effort to access Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal than publics in some other areas of the world. As discussed earlier, Chinese authorities have complained to US authorities about the publication of Chinese air quality data on foreign media, which was then easily accessible in China; the reason cited was that information about air quality on foreign media caused ‘confusion’ among Chinese publics, and were ‘conflictual’ to the information provided by authorities in Beijing (Branigan, 2012).

While this study has no intention of evaluating such restriction of foreign media access, it could have great impact on the mediation path model proposed in the previous section. With less access to foreign media, foreign media’s activation effect on the Chinese public could be smaller. In other words, access levels to foreign media could be a moderator of the relationship between media affinity and three types of psychological activation (problem recognition, involvement recognition and constraint recognition), and between publics’ dependency on media and their psychological activation.

Proposers of the hot-issue publics also said that hot-issue publics usually involve ‘identification with a wider social grouping’ (Kim et al., 2012). In China, having access to non-governmental media, or even Westernized media, can result in the formation of different mindsets and values among the public (Liu, 2012; Willnat et al., 1997; Zhu and He, 2002). These would in turn influence public audiences’ activeness during media coverage about a social or national issue. It was also found that the accessibility levels of local and Western media significantly influenced the formation of materialist values among the public in Hong Kong (Willnat et al., 1997). This implies that access to foreign media can be influential in the formation of the Chinese public’s relationship with foreign media.

The unknown part of this theoretical assumption is through which route does people’s relationship with foreign media influence psychological activation? As found earlier, cross-situational traits could have an activating effect by (1) cutting short constraint recognition; (2) increasing problem recognition; (3) increasing involvement recognition; and (4) a mixture of all three. Thus, this study has the following research question:

RQ. Which of the three psychological antecedents – problem recognition, involvement recognition and constraint recognition – can be significantly influenced by foreign media, given its restricted accessibility in China?

Also, given the above-mentioned role of access to foreign media, this study measures it in the format of publics’ perception of foreign media accessibility and proposes the following hypotheses, for the final proposal of a model of mediated moderation (Figure 2):

H4. The Chinese public’s perception of the accessibility of foreign media will heighten the effect of foreign media affinity on foreign media dependency.

H5. The Chinese public’s perception of the accessibility of foreign media will heighten the effect of foreign media affinity on their psychological activeness.

Methods

Affinity with foreign media (independent variable)

As Gunther (1992) pointed out, the perception of media affinity can be situational for a person given different themes, times and platforms. Thus, the current study will anchor such perceptions at a given theme and moment and adopt a multi-item measurement for different types of media platforms. Before asking the questions, the respondents will first read a definition of foreign media, which is defined as internationally well-known media organizations (newspapers, magazines, TV or radio companies, online news websites, and international news agencies such as the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters) that are not headquartered in mainland China, but in countries and regions such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and so on. Then they will answer four questions of the media affinity scale (Wanta and Hu, 1994). The questions can be seen in Table 1.

Table 1.

Means, standard deviations, reliabilities of latent constructs.

Latent construct
Items	Mean	SD	Cronbach’s alpha
Perceived foreign media accessibility	3.70	1.67
My social environment facilitates me to access foreign online news media	3.70	1.67	.845
People around me usually have access to foreign online news media	3.65	1.67
Foreign online news media contents are readily available in my life	3.75	1.67
Perceived domestic media accessibility	5.31	1.64
It is easy for me to access domestic online news media	5.31	1.66	.893
People around me usually have access to domestic online news media	5.22	1.63
Domestic online news media contents are readily available in my life	5.41	1.63
Perceived foreign media credibility	3.74	1.50
Foreign media orgs get facts accurately.	3.95	1.45	.902
Foreign media orgs deal fairly with all sides of political or social issue	3.69	1.50
Foreign media orgs separate facts from opinions	4.09	1.38
Foreign media orgs is generally not biased	3.43	1.59
Foreign media orgs are concerned with my community’s well-being	3.24	1.61
Foreign media orgs are concerned about the public welfare for my people	3.75	1.52
Foreign media orgs report socially meaningful stories	4.01	1.45
Perceived domestic media credibility	4.39	1.44
Domestic media orgs get facts accurately	4.50	1.35	.898
Domestic media orgs deal fairly with all sides of political or social issue	4.17	1.44
Domestic media orgs separate facts from opinions	4.27	1.40
Domestic media orgs are concerned with my community’s well-being	4.28	1.51
Domestic media orgs are concerned about the public welfare for my people	4.54	1.49
Domestic media orgs report socially meaningful stories	4.72	1.38
Domestic media orgs are in touch with average Chinese people	4.27	1.53
Perceived foreign media dependency	3.76	1.18
Gain insight into why you do some of the things you do			.93
Observe how others cope with problems or situations like yours
Keep up with world events
Stay on top of what is happening in the community
Imagine what you’ll be like when you grow older
Find out how the country is doing
Decide where to go for services such as health, financial or household
Figure out what to buy
Plan where to go for evening and weekend activities
Discover better ways to communicate with others
Think about how to act with friends, relatives, or people you work with
Get ideas about how to approach others in important or difficult situations
Perceived domestic media dependency	4.57	1.04
Same as above, but focused on domestic media			.916

SD: standard deviation.

Dependency on foreign media (mediator)

Survey measurements of media system dependencies at the individual level were developed and consolidated by Ball-Rokeach and DeFleur (1976) and Grant (1991). The original 18 items measure three established components of media dependency: understanding, orientation and play. For the current study, only the understanding and the orientation aspects of media dependency are used. The items are statements of daily tasks of media functions, and the respondents are asked to rate how much they rely on foreign media by selecting the degree of helpfulness (1 = not at all, 7 = extremely). The reliability of the scale is reported in Table 1.

Psychological antecedents for activeness (dependent variables)

After consulting the proposers of the STOPS model, our measures of these three constructs (problem recognition, constraint recognition and involvement recognition) were adopted from the studies of Kim et al. (2010) and Kim and Grunig (2011). The questionnaire used a unidimensional 7-point scale in all items of the STOPS model. Every item asked respondents to indicate their level of agreement from absence of agreement (not at all) to full agreement (absolutely). The finalized items and the reliability of the scales can be seen in Table 1.

Foreign media accessibility (moderator)

This variable is conceptualized as the policy accessibility of a given media, and the current study focused on the Chinese public’s perception of (1) how easily they and other citizens can access foreign media; (2) how available the foreign media content is; and (3) how a person’s social environment facilitates foreign media access. The questionnaire used a unidimensional 7-point scale in all items in this scale. The actual scale and their reliability levels are reported in Table 1.

Sampling

This study collaborated with Baidu MTC (a Chinese survey company) to recruit respondents. Baidu is not only the largest search engine in China with around 870 million users, it is also able to provide advanced solutions for higher requirements of respondent demographics. Institutional review board (IRB) approval was sought and granted before data collection. The sampling of our respondents will require the sampling company to recruit a quota sample mimicking the national statistics of the demographics. Meanwhile, before the survey starts, the respondents will see our definition of foreign media, and a screening question of ‘Have you ever had access to any extent to foreign media by any means?’ will be asked. The sampling process was initiated on 28 January 2018. The respondents received local currency equivalent to US$1.5–US$2.5 after completing the survey voluntarily.

Sample demographics

While the whole sample tended to imitate national demographics, and was collected for multiple studies, this study only retained 572 respondents who answered ‘yes’ to the screening question (to give more validity to our measures). The 572 respondents reside across 29 provinces (or provincial regions such as autonomous region or autonomous cities) out of 31 possible such regions, with no responses collected from Xizang province (Tibet province) and Qinghai province. Table 3 shows the geographical distribution of our respondents in terms of their provincial residence and tier of residence. It shows that the sample has mimicked a geographical balance of the northern, southern, eastern and western parts of China in each category. Tables 2 and 3 show the details of the above-mentioned demographic variables. To be comparable with the national population census, some of the categories were recoded in our data.

Table 2.

Sample demographics.

	Current study		2010 Chinese National Population Census^a		Two sample proportion test
	(N = 572)		(in thousands, N = 133,972)		(p value)^b
	n	%	n	%
Gender
Male	272	48	68,685	51
Female	300	52	65,287	49
Age
15–19	12	2	76,215	8
20–24	106	19	99,704	10	.06
25–29	176	31	128,614	13	0
30–34	155	27	104,886	10	0
35–39	70	12	92,998	9
40–44	22	4	114,560	11
45–49	24	4	124,891	12
50–54	3	1	104,364	10	.05
55–59	2	0	80,581	8
60–64	2	0	78,456	8
Education
Illiterate	0	0	5466	4	N/A^c
Primary School	0	0	35,876	29	N/A
Middle School	12	2	51,966	42	0
High School	229	40	18,799	15	0
Bachelor and above	331	58	11,964	10	0
Residence
City	448	78	66,558	50	0
Rural	124	22	67,415	50	0

Data from the 2010 Tabulation on the 2010 Population Census of the People’s Republic of China, available at: http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/pcsj/rkpc/6rp/indexch.htm

Tests comparing proportions of two independent samples using z-score; if no p value is reported, then such test was not significant at p < .10 level, providing support for small or minimal proportional difference.

Not available because one of the proportion was zero, which inhibits calculation.

Table 3.

Sample geographical distribution.

	Current study		2010 Chinese National Population Census^a		Two sample proportion test
	(N = 572)		(in thousands, N = 133,972)		(p value)^b
	n	%	n	%
Provincial Administrations
Beijing	44	7.70	1961	1.50	0
Tianjing	8	1.40	1294	1.00
Hebei	34	5.90	7185	5.40
Shanxi	18	3.10	3571	2.70
Inner Mongolia	1	0.20	2471	1.80	0
Liaoning	29	5.10	4375	3.30
Jilin	10	1.70	2746	2.10
Heilongjiang	8	1.40	3831	2.90	.01
Shanghai	30	5.20	2302	1.70	0
Jiangsu	30	5.20	7866	5.90
Zhejiang	33	5.80	5443	4.10
Anhui	11	1.90	5950	4.40	0
Fujian	11	1.90	3689	2.80
Jiangxi	5	0.90	4457	3.30	0
Shandong	44	7.70	9579	7.20
Henan	18	3.10	9402	7.00	0
Hubei	13	2.30	5724	4.30	0
Hunan	4	0.70	6568	4.90	0
Guangdong	61	10.70	10,430	7.80	.07
Guangxi	29	5.10	4603	3.40
Hainan	2	0.30	867	0.70
Chongqing	26	4.50	2885	2.20	.02
Sichuan	59	10.30	8042	6.00	0
Guizhou	6	1.00	3475	2.60	0
Yunnan	4	0.70	4597	3.40	0
Xizang	0	0.00	300	0.20	0
Shaanxi	25	4.40	3733	2.80
Gansu	5	0.90	2558	1.90	.02
Qinghai	0	0.00	563	0.40	0
Ningxia	1	0.20	630	0.50
Xinjiang	3	0.50	2181	1.60	0

Data from the 2010 Tabulation on the 2010 Population Census of the People’s Republic of China, available at: http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/pcsj/rkpc/6rp/indexch.htm

Analytical strategy

Data cleaning and preliminary analyses, which included the removal of ineligible study participants, computing descriptive statistics and calculating scale reliability coefficients, were all performed in SPSS® (Version 23.0). Hayes and Preacher’s (2014) bootstrapping procedure (as implemented in PROCESS; Hayes, 2013) was used to test hypothesized indirect effects (H1, H2 and H3 in Model 4). Using this analytical approach, indirect effects can be interpreted as statistically significant if the corresponding bias-corrected bootstrap-confidence interval (CI) does not contain zero. For the mediation model, H1 and H2 include sub-level hypotheses corresponding to problem recognition, involvement recognition and constraint recognition as dependent variables. Model 4 in Hayes’ (2013) PROCESS will be run three times to see which of the psychological antecedents were influenced by foreign media dependency.

Model 8 in PROCESS was used to test the moderation and moderated mediation hypotheses (Figure 2). In the moderation analysis, statistically significant interaction terms denote the presence of moderation, while inspection of the coefficients’ values for a given path (i.e. simple slopes; θ x→y) at each value of the moderator elucidates the nature of the moderation effect (Table 6). Inference regarding moderated mediation is assessed using Hayes’ (2015) index of moderated mediation; 5000 bootstrap samples were specified to generate bias-corrected CIs related to the mediation and moderated mediation tests described above. Socio-demographic characteristics were entered as controls in these analyses, as they might exert confounding effects in non-experimental studies.

Results

Results of H1–H3

The study performed three path model tests using Model 4, using problem recognition, involvement recognition and constraint recognition, respectively, as the dependent variable. As can be seen in Table 4, the results of the three simple mediation models showed that when problem recognition and involvement recognition were dependent variables, there was no statistically significant relationship between the Chinese public’s relationship with foreign media and psychological activeness. However, affinity with foreign media and dependency on foreign media have significant negative effects on the Chinese public’s constraint recognition. This path model is illustrated in Figure 3.

Table 4.

Hypothesis testing of the mediation model.

	Hypothesized path start	Hypothesized path end	Hypothesized relationship	Unstandardized coefficient	p	Results
Problem recognition as DV
H1A	Foreign media dependency	Problem recognition	+		N.S.	Rejected
H2A	Foreign media affinity	Problem recognition	+		N.S.	Rejected
Involvement recognition as DV
H1B	Foreign Media Dependency	Involvement recognition	+		N.S.	Rejected
H2B	Foreign Media Affinity	Involvement recognition	+		N.S.	Rejected
Constraint recognition as DV
H1C	Foreign media dependency	Constraint recognition	-	−.39	.004	Supported
H2C	Foreign media affinity	Constraint recognition	-	−.14	.000	Supported

N.S. = not significant at p < .05 level.

DV: dependent variable.

Figure 3 shows that the results of the analysis indicated a statistically significant, negative direct effect of foreign media affinity on the Chinese public’s constraint recognition (β = −.39, p < .005) when dependency was not included as a mediating variable in the model (Table 5). This shows that affinity is negatively related to constraint recognition of the Chinese public’s communicative activeness towards air pollution, while controlling for socio-demographic outcomes. In other words, affinity with foreign media reduces the psychological constraints that the Chinese public perceives, which prevent them from engaging in communicative actions against air pollution. Thus, affinity with foreign media makes the Chinese public more psychologically active.

Table 5.

Unstandardized model coefficients on constraint recognition.

Predictors	Outcome variable
	Foreign media dependency (mediator)	Constraint recognition
Control variables
Age	−.0022 (.0044)	−.0016 (.0052)
Education	.1271 (.0457)**	−.0284 (.0546)
Gender	.1392 (.0764)	−.0030 (.0909)
Residence	.0381 (.0505)	−.0041 (.0600)
Theory variables
Foreign media affinity	.6522 (.0296)***	−.1365 (.0479)**
Foreign media dependency	–	−.3919 (.0499)***
	R² = .47***	R² = .25***
	F(5, 566) = 100.292***	F(5, 565) = 31.587***

The first column depicts the relationship between affinity and dependency through potentially spurious mechanisms that are not explicitly modelled. Standard errors are in parentheses.

**p < .01; ***p < .005.

The analysis also indicated there was a significant negative direct effect of foreign media dependency (path b in Figure 3) on constraint recognition, β = −.39, p < .000. Thus, H1C and H2C, which predicted a negative relationship between affinity, dependency and constraint recognition, were supported. The second hypothesis (H3) predicted that dependency would mediate the relationship between affinity and constraint recognition. The mediation analysis confirmed that there was a statistically significant negative indirect effect of affinity through dependency (point estimate = −.26, SE = .03, 95% CI = (−.32, −.19)), and that the effect of affinity (path c’) was diminished, though still statistically significant, when dependency was included as a mediator. Thus, H3 was supported.

Results of RQ and H4–H5

The research question asks which one of the psychological antecedents of communicative activeness would be significantly influenced by the Chinese public’s relationship with foreign media. The examination of the three mediation models have already provided an answer: as illustrated in Table 4, a relationship (affinity and dependency) with foreign media seems to significantly reduce the Chinese public’s constraint recognition, but were not significantly related to problem recognition and involvement recognition of the air pollution problem.

Thus, using constraint recognition as the only dependent variable, the predicted moderating roles of accessibility of foreign media on both the direct and indirect effects of foreign media affinity posited by H4 and H5 were also tested using the PROCESS macro (Model 8). This moderated procedure used bootstrapped 95% bias-corrected CIs to test the moderating effects in the model at the 16th, 50th and 84th percentile values of the hypothesized moderator. As shown in Table 6, analysis related to H4 showed that there was a significant but positive interaction between foreign media affinity and accessibility (β = .04, p < .05), however, the Johnson–Neyman technique showed that the cut-off point of conditional effects was not contained in our sample’s range. This indicates that the effect of foreign media affinity on dependency was theoretically moderated by the Chinese public’s perception of foreign media accessibility (moderation on path a). The relationship between affinity and dependency on foreign media became stronger as foreign media were perceived as more accessible by the Chinese public. Conversely, the relationship became weaker as the Chinese public perceived foreign media to be less accessible. Thus, H4 was supported.

Table 6.

Conditional direct and indirect effects.

Direct effect at different values of the moderator (perceived levels of foreign media accessibility)
Access level n	β	SE	t	p	CI
2.25	−.02	.0599	−0.3164	.752	(−.1367, .0988)
3.6429	−.09	.0474	−1.9642	.050	(−.1863, .0000)
3.75	−.10	.0473	−2.0903	.037	(−.1918, −.0060)
5.25	−.18	.0585	−3.0578	.002	(−.2936, −.0639)
Access level n	β	SE			CI
Indirect effect at different values of the moderator
2.25	−.15	.0330			(−.2128, −.0848)
3.75	−.17	.0317			(−.2262, −.1025)
5.25	−.18	.0338			(−.2503, −.1167)

SE: standard error; CI: confidence interval.

Values shown for moderator are 16th, 50th and 84th percentiles; for conditional direct effects, values at p = .05 (Johnson–Neyman technique cutting point) was also illustrated.

For H5, as the results of the interaction effects on the direct effect (path c’) show (Figure 4), the effect of affinity on constraint recognition also depends on the Chinese public’s perception of foreign media accessibility (β = −.05, p < .05). When the level of perceived accessibility of foreign media was low (lower than 3.6 units using our 7-point measurement), affinity was no longer significantly related to constraint recognition, losing its psychologically constraint-reducing ability (the Johnson–Neyman technique showed that the cut-off point of conditional effects was contained in our sample’s range). These results indicate support for H5, which proposed that perceived accessibility of foreign media would heighten the negative effect of affinity on constraint recognition.

Yet, although the moderation on path c’ was significant (H5), the conditional effect of path a (H4) was only theoretically existent (meaning that given the current data, path a will always be significant because the data range does not reach the point at which there is a conditional effect). Hayes’ (2015) index of moderated mediation (point estimate = −.012, SE = .007, 95% CI = (−.0271, .0005)) indicated that this moderated mediation effect was not statistically significant because the bias-corrected bootstrap CI for the coefficient did straddle zero. In short, although H4 and H5 were supported, that access has a heightening moderation effect on path a, the conditional effects of affinity on dependency was only theoretically significant.

Discussion

This study focused on a media diplomacy phenomenon in China: foreign media’s activation of the Chinese public about air pollution as a social and national problem in China. It conceptualized the Chinese public’s relationship with foreign media (affinity and dependency) as cross-situational traits that would influence their psychological activeness; second, it examined through which route (i.e. problem recognition, involvement recognition and constraint recognition) the relationship with foreign media could modify the Chinese public’s communicative activeness; third, the study examined the moderating role of perceived accessibility of foreign media in the previously mentioned relationship.

On the first main finding of this study: when conceptualized as a cross-situational trait, affinity and dependency on foreign media among the Chinese public were found to be significant relievers of their perception of constraints that would prevent them from communicating about the problem. If a Chinese audience has more affinity with foreign media, it would feel more empowered and less constrained to speak out about the issue. In other words, Chinese people who believe in and feel friendly towards foreign media would have more situational motivation to communicate about the problem of air pollution.

Moreover, the result that dependency significantly mediates the ‘relieving’ effect of foreign media affinity on psychological constraints has several implications: that merely feeling close or friendly towards foreign media does not fully unlock its potential in terms of the transnational activation effect. A public in another country needs to be somehow reliant on foreign media for the activation effect to be maximized. That is, dependency on foreign media is a much more effective variable in explaining how foreign media relieves the Chinese public’s constraint recognition. The mediation model shown in Figure 3 shows exactly this point.

On the second main finding of the study: based on previous literature on hot-issue publics, the researchers found that activation of psychological antecedents (i.e. increasing problem recognition, involvement recognition or reducing constraint recognition of publics towards the issue) follows different routes given the different cross-situational traits of the public. The current article found that in a context where access to foreign media has been restricted, foreign media seems to have been disassociated with publics’ problem recognition and involvement recognition towards air pollution. It is probable that the Chinese public’s current understanding of the problem and its cognitive sense of involvement are mainly contributed by its relationship with the domestic media, not foreign media. Yet, the relationship with foreign media may still be relevant to the relief of constraint recognition of solving the problem through communicative action among the Chinese public.

On the third main finding of this study: access to foreign media, as perceived by the Chinese public, has been a significant moderator in the relationship between foreign media affinity and dependency, as well as on that between affinity and constraint recognition. In sum, the more accessible foreign media is perceived to be, the more robust those relationships would be. With lessened access among Chinese publics, foreign media may eventually lose its activating power on Chinese publics.

This suggests that the domestic government’s policy on foreign media access could be effective in cutting short the power of foreign media among its citizens. The reason why the current study observed significant moderation on direct effect but only theoretically significant moderated mediation is that access to foreign media is predominantly lower in comparison to the Johnson–Neyman cutting point. In other words, access to foreign media in China may have been cut to the point where data do not cover this theoretical mediated moderation.

The current study has confirmed, to a certain extent, the effectiveness of restriction of foreign media accessibility in countering foreign media’s influence domestically. However, it does not answer the question of who are more likely to be persuaded by foreign media. This question emerges as the response to the preoccupation that perhaps the relationship between affinity with foreign media and lessened constraint recognition could be spurred by a general lack of trust in government or high activist motivation among certain groups of Chinese people. Thus, the next question to be asked might be: if foreign media has an activating effect, then who are more likely to be activated by foreign media?

The summary of the findings and implications of this study further entangles with new opportunities and threats that emerged in transnational persuasion or activation, as in the recent cases of political bots on Facebook and RT’s ‘misinformation’ campaign during the 2016 US election. It seems that practitioners, policy-makers and scholars of transnational persuasion have arrived at a crossroads of choices: Should governments embrace higher surveillance across media platforms to identify foreign influence attempts, or even block off information sources that are potentially inciteful and potentially harmful for social stability? Or should policy-makers advocate for higher media literacy and implement nationwide education about foreign media? These questions are yet to be answered.

This study has several limitations and implications for future research. First, although it found the activating effect of foreign media among the Chinese public by cutting short constraint recognition, it does not cover potential spurious factors such as government trust or Internet savvy-ness because these two could be important indicators of whether a Chinese person would and could get access to foreign media. Moreover, foreign media’s activation of domestic publics could also be examined in a media environment where foreign media is less restricted, so that researchers could observe more variance in foreign media access. Last but not least, the current sample tried its best to mimic the geographical and demographical composition of the Chinese national sample, but future studies, with more resources and support from local authorities, could obtain a more representative sample.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article: This research is supported by ‘The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities’ [Grant no.: 02600/310422111].

ORCID iD

Yicheng Zhu

Author biography

Yicheng Zhu is an assistant professor of Mass Communication in the School of Journalism and Communication at Beijing Normal University. Zhu holds a PhD from the University of South Carolina. Zhu’s research interests include international public relations, online political persuasion and immersive storytelling.

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