Public Opinion of the King Sejong Institute in China—Based on the analysis of Media Reports from WeChat Official Accounts

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

International public opinion on King Sejong Institute (KSI) is one of the most important factors influencing its overseas development as a worldwide non-profit educational service organization. China is one of the overseas strategic regions for KSI to spread the Korean Language. This paper intends to assess KSI's current public opinion environment in China. With content analysis of 87 news reports related to KSI in WeChat Official Accounts from 2014 to 2022, this paper attempts to assess the public opinion environment of KSI in China. In this paper, we show that the Chinese media’s current attention to KSI is generally lacking. The current reports focus more on activity narrations, and the main report factors come from local media and universities’ on-campus news, which have relatively weak dissemination power and limited influences. On one side, the reasons are related to the characteristics of Chinese media, while the KSI establishment method in China also accounts for a lot. Therefore, it is necessary for the KSI to timely adjust the cooperation mode and publicity strategies according to the Chinese political and cultural characteristics to promote the sustainable development of KSI in China by continuously improving the public opinion environment.

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