I have long observed foreign politicians trying to engage with Chinese fans, sometimes in the millions, through social media. Their teams waste no time uploading their schedules, speeches and short ideas in English, French or other languages.

 

However, these messages usually fail to reach the Chinese public, mainly because they are not written in Chinese.

 

So I have drawn³ the impolite conclusion that most efforts by foreign politicians and their handlers to involve ordinary Chinese via social media have been pretty much failures.

 

But Cameron's team has made a difference. It set up a micro blog for the prime minister on Sina Weibo. Cameron is a latecomer, but for the prime minister it has been a case of better late than never.

 

By Wednesday, Cameron had uploaded seven posts, even though he only started to use the tool on Friday. Of the seven, three were posted as warm-up messages before he began his China tour.

 

Cameron has used the Chinese language in all of his posts, and two are bilingual. This marks a huge difference from the posts of other global political figures in the past.

 

In terms of content, Cameron's posts are all simple and original, and accompanied by photos. They are not mere⁴ recaps of official documents, schedules and speeches.

 

Not shy of advertising⁵, Cameron has even managed to publish two posts about Land Rover in a short time, in an effort to help market the car brand to China's new rich.

 

The most interesting part of Cameron's excursion⁶ into Chinese social media is his team's ambition to set up a dialogue between the prime minister and the public. In one recent post, Cameron asked his followers⁷ to leave questions for him, saying he would answer some of them before he left China.

 

The number of Cameron's micro blog followers surpassed⁸ 260,000 in one week, roughly⁹ equal to the number of subscribers to two of his country's newspapers, The Guardian¹⁰ and The Financial Times.

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