Echoes and resistance: China’s discourse power and public perceptions in Central Europe

In recent years, Beijing has intensified its information operations abroad, including in the EU, under its goal to enhance the party-state’s discourse power. The primary objective is to bolster China’s image and project “positive energy” about the country while simultaneously mitigating negative discourse and dissuading criticism. As China is engaged in a growing number of international issues and agendas, itis expanding from its narrow focus of core issues with relevance to Chinese domestic political legitimacy to seeking to influence broader conversations around the world.

The countries of Central Europe — Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia — which have had tumultuous development of relations with China over the past decade, have not escaped the targeting by China as part of its global propaganda campaign. At the same time, perceptions of China have largely been filtered through the specific societal, cultural, and historical factors in each of the target countries, making the image China largely determined by domestic factors.

The present study matches a large-scale public opinion polling on perceptions of China and China-related narratives with an in-depth qualitative analysis of social media discourse on key platforms,  focusing on the interaction of outside attempts to manipulate the information environment with the domestic factors.

Executive summary

1. China has become a fixture on social media in Central Europe, especially within the Visegrad Four (V4) countries: Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. Embassy accounts, state-media accounts, and other state-affiliated channels have a significant presence, although Chinese accounts still struggle to generate meaningful engagement.
2. China’s use of state-affiliated influencers and cooperation with Central European influencers has become the latest tool in its propaganda toolbox. These influencers enable the production of more tailored, organic content, although data shows they tend to avoid political topics and focus on spreading “positive energy.”
3. Public opinion polling shows that China’s image in Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia remains negative. Czechs hold the most negative views, while Slovaks are the most positive towards China among the V4 countries. However, even in Slovakia, negative views still outnumber positive ones.
4. In the V4, more educated and liberal people tend to have more negative views of China, pointing to the role of domestic (or autochthonous) factors in shaping public opinion.
5. Frequent readers of Chinese media or followers of Chinese social media accounts have significantly more positive views of China than the general population. However, they make up a small segment of the population and are likely predisposed to favorable views.
6. More frequent use of TikTok, as well as Telegram and YouTube, is statistically associated with relatively more positive perceptions of China. This may reflect exposure to a broader range of non-mainstream perspectives on these platforms. However, even among frequent V4 users of TikTok, overall sentiment toward China remains negative, and the association does not support definitive conclusions about whether the platform‘s algorithms favor pro-China content.
7. Public opinion polling shows limited acceptance of China-supported narratives about China and its domestic and foreign policies among the V4 populations.
8. Central Europeans are generally not attracted by China’s political system or values and remain unconvinced about the alleged peaceful nature of China’s foreign policy. They mostly view Chinese policies on Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan negatively and do not tend to accept China’s delineation of its “core interests.” However, they are relatively more positively receptive to China’s economic model and foreign economic policy.
9. In the V4 countries, a significant portion of the population believes the unsubstantiated theory that COVID-19 was artificially created in a Chinese lab and intentionally released. This belief is more widespread than acceptance of the zoonotic origin hypothesis or the conspiracy theory, promoted by Chinese propaganda, that the United States (US) was linked to the spread of the pandemic.
10.  A large-scale narrative analysis of the social media corpus across all key social media platforms between January 2022 and May 2025 shows that Chinese narratives are often organically adopted by domestic actors in the V4 countries to support their preexisting narratives. For instance, China is frequently used as a mirror to criticize the perceived failings of the West, the US and the European Union (EU). China is rarely discussed on its own terms. This, combined with polling results, suggests that perceptions of China are shaped by domestic political, cultural, and historical factors, rather than being directly formed as a result of China’s influence on local discourse.