THE IMAGE OF KAZAKHSTAN IN CHINESE MEDIA IN THE CONTEXT OF CHINA'S FOREIGN POLICY IN CENTRAL ASIA

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between the evolution of China’s foreign policy in Central Asia and the transformation of Kazakhstan’s image in leading Chinese media. The empirical corpus comprises 653 publications about Kazakhstan published in People’s Daily (including its overseas edition), Xinhua Daily Telegraph, and Global Times between 2013 and 2025, together with Chinese policy documents concerning Central Asia. The study combines qualitative content analysis with critical discourse analysis. The findings reveal a pronounced alignment between political and media agendas: the thematic structure of coverage corresponds substantially to major foreign-policy priorities, official political concepts function as narrative resources, and shifts in the foreign-policy agenda temporally coincide with changes in representations of Kazakhstan. On this basis, the article proposes an integrative framework of “political embeddedness,” expressed as the sequence “foreign-policy agenda → political discourse → media representation → formation and transformation of country image.” Unlike the authors’ previous study based on the same corpus, which focused on the characteristics of Kazakhstan’s media image and its relevance to bilateral interaction, the present article reverses the analytical direction and examines how the foreign-policy framework is associated with media themes, discourse, and diachronic image change. The results support a plausible mechanism of political-media alignment but do not by themselves establish strict causality.