The Chinese Embassy in Kuwait is learnt to have embarked on a media drive to improve the country’s image. Towards this end, the Embassy has apparently hired a team of experts who are approaching Kuwaiti journalists to provide ground level feedback about China, its economic policies and its ongoing confrontation with the US on the Taiwan issue.
They have also been tasked to interview Kuwaiti officials, local experts and scholars on a variety of issues, including China Arab Cooperation Forum Framework, China-Kuwait bilateral relations, Sino-US tensions and sentiments about China within the local intelligentsia.
2However, Kuwaiti media fraternity is vary of these moves, viewing them as ‘investigations’ rather than surveys. Many journalists were reportedly reluctant to participate in any such exercise. The sudden spurt of activities aimed at assessing China’s popularity was being seen as a sign of nervousness with respect to Beijing’s recent tensions with the US over the Taiwan issue. Inputs indicate that similar exercises may be conducted in other Middle East countries as China attempts to build more allies in the region.
This is not the first time that China has tried to influence the media in Kuwait. Last year, China was globally condemned for bullying the Kuwait- based English daily Arab Times into deleting from its website an already published interview with the Taiwan Minister of Foreign Affairs Joseph Wu.
A number of Chinese propaganda news websites have also been publishing articles that speak highly of Sino-Kuwait relations and various Chinese so-called development projects under the Belt and Road Initiative.
Incidentally, several Chinese media houses had established their offices in Indonesia to ease local recruitment of journalists, to facilitate and amplify Chinese propaganda stories in the local language.
It is viewed that the Gulf is of high strategic value to both China and the US, relevant to their energy security and is a site of geopolitical unrest. Beijing is leaving no stone unturned to build closer affiliations within the region, using its influence operations as one of the key tools.
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