China hires US influencers to clean its image ahead of Winter Olympics

Throughout the Winter Olympics, a swarm of western social media influencers, each with hundreds of thousands of followers on TikTok, Instagram, or Twitch, will propagate favorable news about China. Concerned about the worldwide backlash against the Beijing Olympics, which has resulted in a wave of diplomatic boycotts, the administration has employed western public relations experts to disseminate a counter-narrative via social media. With the slogan ‘Together for a Shared Future,’ China’s governing Communist Party and the International Olympic Committee are hoping that the spats would fade away once the Games begin. Last month, it was discovered that the Chinese government…