How China Speaks to The World In The Covid-19 Era: China’s Political Communication and Mobilisation in Europe

How China Speaks to The World In The Covid-19 Era is a research initiative led by the department of China Studies at Aarhus University. The research project investigates how Chinese-language media targeting diaspora communities across Europe engage with and represent key political developments on the continent. Focusing on the intersection between transnational media practices and state influence, the project examines how media outlets aimed at Chinese-speaking populations in Europe cover major political events such as EU elections and national votes, with particular attention to the narratives they promote and the discourses they shape.

The project explores how these diaspora media platforms may function as channels for political influence, assessing the extent to which they align with, amplify, or diverge from narratives promoted by the Chinese state. Through a combination of media analysis, computational methods, and discourse studies, the project provides new insight into how political communication travels across linguistic and national boundaries, and how digital media spaces become sites for negotiation of identity, belonging, and power. 

Role of Center for Humanities Computing  

The How China Speaks to The World In The Covid-19  research initiative is one of several collaborative projects between the Department of China Studies and the Center for Humanities Computing, which explore how computational methodologies can help shed new light on humanities research and analysis
The Center for Humanities Computing contributes extensively to the technical and analytical infrastructure of the project. This includes:

• Designing and implementing custom web scraping tools to collect data from targeted media sources at six-hour intervals, creating a dynamic and continually updated corpus of Chinese-language news content
• Hosting and maintaining the data infrastructure used to store and manage the corpus
• Supporting data cleaning, processing, and preparation for advanced text analysis
• Development and application of topic modelling techniques to identify dominant themes and discursive patterns across the collected content.
• Contributing to the project’s scientific and methodological framework by integrating computational analysis with humanities-based research, as well as co-authoring scientific papers related to the project.

By combining computational methods with critical inquiry, CHC plays a key role in enabling scalable and reproducible research into the global flows of media and influence, offering a robust digital foundation for understanding how diasporic media reflect and respond to geopolitical agendas.