
You Watch But Don’t Absorb
As independent journalists face mounting pressure in Kyrgyzstan, Chinese state media have quietly built influence over two decades. Adina Masalbekova tells Lingua Sinica how it happened.

Kyrgyz State Technical University named after I. Razzakov (KSTU), commonly known as Kyrgyz State Technical University, is a public, non-profit higher education institution in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, founded in 1954. It is Kyrgyzstan’s largest technical university, offering bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs across engineering, energy, transport, and information technology fields, and includes the Kyrgyz-German Technical Institute, established with the Berlin Technical University of Applied Sciences in 2004. KSTU was previously recognized by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Kyrgyz Republic; oversight of Kyrgyzstani universities now falls to the Ministry of Science, Higher Education and Innovation, formed when that ministry was split in May 2025. KSTU hosts the Kyrgyzstan Luban Workshop, a vocational training center built with Zhejiang University of Water Resources and Electric Power and unveiled in October 2024.
