MPD Alumni Spotlight: Di Wu

To commemorate the 20th anniversary of the USC Master of Public Diplomacy program, housed at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the USC Center on Public Diplomacy interviewed distinguished alumni for a special series reflecting on their time at USC, their professional achievements, and the paths their careers have taken since graduation. View the complete list of alumni interviews. 

Please introduce yourself, your class of MPD, and explain what you are currently doing and have done since graduating from USC.

My name is Di Wu, and I was part of the MPD class of 2010. I came to USC Annenberg straight from China, where I had just finished a master's in international relations. Public diplomacy was a new world to me then, and Los Angeles even more so.

Since graduating, I have mostly followed the questions the program opened up for me. I went on to earn a PhD in International Relations at American University, where my dissertation asked whether the way public diplomacy is actually implemented is what gives it meaning — a study of U.S. public diplomacy toward China. Today I am an Assistant Professor at the School of Political Science and International Relations at Tongji University in Shanghai, where I teach, research, and write about public diplomacy, U.S.–China relations, strategic communication, and increasingly the Global South. Along the way I published a book with Palgrave Macmillan on U.S. public diplomacy toward China, and more recently a Chinese-language book on strategic communication among Global South countries. In a sense, I never left the field the MPD introduced me to. I just kept following it home.

How has the program, broadly, helped you in your career?

The most direct answer is that the program gave me a field, and I now spend my days handing that field to the next generation. Before USC, I had studied international relations, but public diplomacy was not yet a lens I knew how to use. The MPD gave me one. It taught me to look at the ordinary surfaces of international life, a broadcast, a festival, an exchange program, a government’s choice of words, and to read the diplomacy underneath them. That way of seeing has shaped everything I have done since: it guided my doctoral research, it runs through the books I have written, and it is the thread that connects an essay I wrote as a student to the work I publish today.

These days I teach public diplomacy and strategic communication at Tongji and Shanghai International Studies University, and to my happy surprise the courses have become quite popular among both undergraduate and graduate students. Many of them arrive simply curious and end up writing their theses on the subject, carrying it further than I ask them to. Watching that happen is one of the real pleasures of my work. When a student lights up over a question about how a country talks to foreign publics, or argues that some everyday cultural moment is really an act of diplomacy in disguise, I recognize that moment exactly. It was mine, years ago, in an MPD classroom in Los Angeles.

So the program did not just prepare me for a career. It gave me a way of understanding the world, and then — better still — it gave me something worth passing on. There is a quiet continuity in that: the field I received as a student in California is the field I now hand to students in Shanghai, a little changed by time and distance, but recognizably the same gift.

Was there one particular class in the program which helped prepare you for the workplace?

If I have to choose one, it would be PUBD 504, “Global Issues and Public Diplomacy,” taught by Nick Cull, Eytan Gilboa, and Mark Smith. Looking back, what mattered most was not only the content but the way we learned it — in teams, designing real projects together, with our hands on the work rather than only in our notes.

The course was built around a simple but demanding rhythm. Almost every week we were handed a genuine global challenge, terrorism, arms control, public health, the environment, human rights, disinformation, and asked, as a team, to design an actual public diplomacy strategy for it: to take something sprawling and complicated and turn it into a clear, transmissible message for very different audiences. Then we had to stand up and defend it. And when our own team was not presenting, we sat on the “Murder Board,” whose job was to cross-examine the team that was. So in a single course you learned three things at once: how to build an argument, how to take one apart, and how to hold your ground when your own work came under fire. The teams were reshuffled every few weeks, and at the end of each cycle we even graded one another, which meant there was nowhere to hide and no one else to carry your share.

As an international student from China, almost all of this was new to me. I had been trained to study alone and to value the individual exam; collaborating in a rotating group, dividing up a project, presenting and defending it under live cross-examination, being judged by my own teammates — these were skills I had simply never been asked to practice. PUBD 504 made me practice them, week after week, until they stopped feeling foreign.

By the time I entered the workplace, that collaborative, project-based, think-on-your-feet way of working had become second nature, and I have relied on it ever since — in research collaborations, in the classroom, in almost every professional setting I have found myself in. There is a particular symmetry to it now: when I design my own courses and watch my students wrestle, sometimes uneasily, with their first real group project, I recognize exactly where they are. I was once standing in the same place, and PUBD 504 is a large part of how I learned to move forward from it.

What is your favorite non-academic memory of your days as an MPD Trojan?

My favorite memory has nothing to do with a classroom. It was the beach party Professor Nick Cull hosted at Redondo Beach. I had only just arrived in a foreign country, and that afternoon I got to know my classmates not as names on a roster but as people, over the sand and the seaside. I also met Nick's family and, for once, had conversations that had nothing to do with reading lists or deadlines. For an international student still finding her footing so far from home, it was a genuinely relaxing day, and a reminder that this program was also a community.

How do you feel the world of public diplomacy and public engagement has changed during your time?

I will give a slightly contrarian answer. In some ways what has changed is not public diplomacy itself, but the attention paid to it. The field I work in, international relations, has never taken public diplomacy as seriously as it deserves — international communication scholars treat it far more seriously than we do. And in Chinese academia the shift has been striking: fifteen years ago, when I was starting out, scholars talked about public diplomacy constantly. Today it has gone quiet, almost out of fashion. Part of the reason is that realism and power politics have come back to dominate how we think about international affairs, and in that climate many people assume public diplomacy is simply no longer relevant. I understand the instinct. But I think it quietly leaves something essential on the table.

I think that assumption is wrong. If anything, public diplomacy matters more now, not less. When I was a student, we still thought of public diplomacy largely as something governments did to foreign publics — broadcasts, exchanges, cultural programs, carefully crafted messages sent out and, we hoped, received. The technologies of the last fifteen years have quietly dismantled that picture. Today every citizen with a phone is at once an audience and a broadcaster. Foreign publics no longer form their impression of a country through official channels; they form it through a stream of posts, videos, comments, and rumors, much of it produced by ordinary people rather than by any ministry. The pandemic made this impossible to ignore. I watched states compete, almost in real time, over whose narrative would travel farther online, and the contest was decided as much by credibility and tone as by the resources behind the message. That is public diplomacy, whether or not anyone in the room calls it by that name — and anyone trying to understand how a country rises or falls in the world's regard today is, like it or not, already studying it.

That gap is what strikes me most about how the field has changed. It is not that public diplomacy has lost its relevance; it is that our attention has drifted away from something now woven into the daily texture of international life. To me, that is exactly the wrong moment to look away — because the questions public diplomacy asks are not going anywhere, and the people who keep asking them will be the ones who read the coming world most clearly. The field has gone quiet, but it is far from finished. If anything, it is waiting for a generation willing to take it seriously again.

What would your advice be to today's students?

My advice is to make public diplomacy relevant to theory and to practice alike. Whatever your home discipline, whether international relations or communication, do not treat public diplomacy as a niche topic off to the side. Bring it into dialogue with the core debates of your field: take a classic theory or perspective and ask what it has to say about public diplomacy, and what public diplomacy says back to it. Tie it to the questions the world is actually arguing about right now.

And one more thing, which I learned the hard way in my own research: study what public diplomacy has done, not only what it could do. It is tempting to write about the promise of public diplomacy, its potential, its ideals. The harder and more valuable work is to look closely at how it has really been practiced, and at what that practice has and has not achieved. That is where the real understanding lives.