Central and Eastern European Countries Through the Eyes of Chinese Social Media: A Case Study of the Official Micro-Blog of China’s Foreign Ministry with Regard to European Affairs
Central and Eastern European Countries Through the Eyes of Chinese Social Media: A Case Study of the Official Micro-Blog of China’s Foreign Ministry with Regard to European Affairs

Summary/Abstract: In order to promote public understanding of Europe and the Sino-European relations,on August 24, 2012, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of Chinaopened an official micro-blog through a Sina Weibo account named ‘@ZhongouXinshi’ (which could be translated into English as ‘Sino–Europe messenger’).In this paper, the authors apply textual and content analysis methods to examinethe posts in the micro-blog in order to find out what kind of image of Central andEastern Europe (CEE) has been shaped by Chinese officials, as reflected in thisspecific Chinese social media account from 2012 on. The main findings of thisstudy have revealed that the Chinese government is shaping the images of the CEEregion on three levels: first, there is the whole region of CEE; second, there arethe sub-regions, such as the Baltic countries, Visegard group, Balkan countries;and the third level is represented by the sixteen CEEC considered separately. Thequantitative analysis based on the investigated posts shows an evident asymmetrybetween the images of sub-regions and individual countries. Meanwhile, countriesthat have closer political or economic relations with China have been posted onthe ‘@Zhongou Xinshi’ more frequently.

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