Abstract
The article answers how growing intensity of China-V4 relations in the period of 2010–2017 impacted the media discourse of China in Central Europe. While diplomatically speaking China and the Visegrad countries reached perhaps the most positive and intensive relations ever, the top-down impact on people’s perceptions is less clear. Media play an important role as an intermediary between the politics and public opinion and their role in EU-China and China-Central Europe relations has been previously discussed. The paper summarizes empirical findings of large-scale research of media reporting related to China in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic from 2010 till mid-2017 in which more than seven thousand media outputs were consulted. It is found that the political relations led to quantitative increase of media coverage of China, yet the qualitative impact is ambivalent, thus questioning the success of Chinese soft power attempts. The discourse on China in the Czech Republic and Hungary is in no small extent politicized, polarized, and media often inform about China based on domestic political considerations, while in Slovakia there is little interest in China overall and media largely follows official narratives and international discourse.
Highlights
Since 2011, China and Central Europe started to write a new chapter of their relations under the labels of 16+1 platform and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI)
The research of Central European media in the three countries revealed that the impact of the intensifying of political relations between China and Central European countries on the media narratives is ambiguous
There was a slight growth of negative-leaning articles in Hungary over time, perhaps related to the growth of criticism towards Orbán’s policies by opposition figures and the somewhat prominent role of China in Hungarian politics
Summary
Since 2011, China and Central Europe started to write a new chapter of their relations under the labels of 16+1 platform and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This era did offer only few chances to interact, given the geographical distance, and more immediate security, political, and economic challenges both sides faced Both China and Central Europe ended up in the communist camp after the Second World War, the contacts were frozen soon after as the result of Sino-Soviet split. For about two decades since the fall of Communist regimes in Central Europe, the attention of both China and Central Europe was directed towards the West It was only after the 2008 economic crisis that the Central European countries started to see China as a potential partner and soon after the two sides started to develop contacts under the banners of the 16+1 platform and the Belt and Road Initiative, reaching the most active levels ever in their history (Fürst and Tesař, 2014; Turcsanyi, forthcoming)
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