The universality of human rights underscores the importance of human rights studies in the context of global competition and foreign policy. Within the United States-China relations, the issue of human rights emerged as a focal point in diplomatic disputes and ideological rivalry. This study examined as a contested ideograph amid the U.S.-China ideological competition in public diplomacy. Through mixed methods, this study examined ideographic interpretations of across different public diplomacy platforms, including government-issued annual human rights reports and state-backed media on Facebook. Using computer-assisted topic modeling, this study revealed the divergent interpretations of between the United States and China, mapping out the diachronic shifts of meanings over 22 years in foreign policy position papers, and five years on social media accounts. The word frequency method helped understand the synchronic connection between and other ideographs in the U.S. and China’s political cultures. Furthermore, sentiment analysis assessed the intensity of the bilateral contestation surrounding , exploring the emotional aspect of ideograph. Eventually, this study adopted critical cultural analysis to examine the contextual factors that corresponded to the shifts of meanings. Overall, the dissertation contributes theoretically by exploring a globally contested ideograph through a comparative lens, methodologically by applying unsupervised machine learning to analyze synchronic and diachronic shifts of the ideographs, and empirically by demonstrating the value of an examination of across various public diplomacy formats within the United States-China relations.