China Cranks Up the Campaign to Lobby African Stakeholders on Xinjiang

With Xinjiang now emerging as a core dividing issue in the increasingly acrimonious U.S.-China relationship, it appears that Beijing is leaning even more on its ties in Africa and other parts of the Global South as part of an effort to build a coalition to counter Washington’s well-documented accusations of widespread human rights violations in the Western Chinese region.

There was a noticeable increase earlier this year in messaging on Xinjiang from Chinese diplomats in Africa and Chinese propaganda outlets that broadcast on the continent. Now it appears they’re ramping up that effort even more with what appear to be newspaper columns written by sympathetic scholars, large-scale diplomatic events, and a coordinated social media outreach on platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

What’s most interesting is that a number of Muslim majority countries on the continent including Chad, Egypt, Sudan, and Burkina Faso are among the most enthusiastic supporters of the Chinese government’s narrative on Xinjiang.

China’s Latest Efforts to Persuade African Publics on Xinjiang

  • PROPAGANDA: When it comes to Chinese broadcast propaganda in Africa, most people mistakenly focus on the traditional outlets like CGTN, China Daily, and China Radio International — all of which have a sizable presence on the continent but very small audiences. What’s been far more effective are the free news feeds that People’s Daily and Xinhua provide to African news sites like Ghanaweb where stories about Xinjiang are seamlessly intermixed with the rest of the site’s content. It takes a sophisticated news consumer to look for the sourcing of an article and determine that it is state propaganda rather than authentic editorial content.
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The post China Cranks Up the Campaign to Lobby African Stakeholders on Xinjiang appeared first on The China Africa Project.



source https://chinaafricaproject.com/2021/03/22/china-cranks-up-the-campaign-to-lobby-african-stakeholders-on-xinjiang/

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