In an era where social media plays an increasingly important role in global communication, universities worldwide actively use various platforms to increase their visibility, shape their institutional identities and engage with international audiences. While extensive research has examined how universities in the West utilize social media for branding and engagement, less attention has been given to how universities in non-Western contexts navigate these digital spaces. In this dissertation, I examined how top Chinese universities represented themselves on X (formerly known as Twitter). Despite the platform’s inaccessibility within China, these universities strategically use it to engage global audiences and construct their institutional prestige. In my analysis, I focused on four leading C9 League universities, namely Peking University, Tsinghua University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Zhejiang University, and investigated how they employ social media to construct their global image through their social media representations.To conduct this study, I employed multimodal discourse analysis, drawing on Stuart Hall’s (1997) theory of representation, Fairclough’s (1995) critical discourse analysis (CDA), Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) visual grammar, and Heinrich’s (2017) photographic techniques. This framework allowed me to examine the interplay between text, imagery, and composition in the social media posts and to unpack the ideological dimensions embedded in these representations. Through this framework, I explored how these universities strategically constructed narratives of global excellence across three key themes: research excellence, student engagement in China’s cultural diplomacy, and global partnerships. My findings revealed how social media representations reinforced discourses about Chinese higher education’s aspirations for world-class status, its role in China’s soft power strategy, and its efforts toward internationalization. In this dissertation, I mainly argue that through multimodal representations on X/Twitter, top Chinese universities actively construct and reinforce the idea of the “world-class university” by foregrounding research excellence, student engagement in cultural diplomacy, and global partnerships. They use digital diplomacy as a tool for promoting international engagement, enhancing institutional prestige, and exercising China’s soft power. The findings of my study contribute to a comprehensive understanding of the complex interplay between media, education, and geopolitics in the representation of Chinese universities. My dissertation advances scholarship in higher education studies and cultural studies by offering insights into the strategic use of social media for institutional representation within a globally competitive landscape. It also calls for a more critical and pluralistic reimagining of what it means to be a world-class university, challenging Western-dominated paradigms and advocating for more contextually diverse definitions of excellence in the context of global higher education.
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