Russia and China are teaming up to collaborate in the information space and push their worldview onto global audiences.
It is well-known that Russian and Chinese troll farms are active all over social media. Moscow in particular has long been the world’s leading propaganda expert, as evidenced by its deployment of “active measures” during the Cold War all the way to the current practice of flooding social media with inauthentic accounts and comments.
In many parts of the world, Russia’s influence operations have been so successful as to convince audiences that its war on Ukraine is justified, or at least make them sympathetic to the Kremlin’s point of view.
The strength of such tactics lies in Russia’s sophistication in studying and understanding audiences, worming into targeted societies’ deepest desires and dividing people from within. This trademark is famously evident in Russian efforts to sway American elections — for instance, by impersonating supporters of President-elect Donald Trump and shaping hot button debates online.
This Russian trait is now observable in Chinese efforts, too.
One example is Spamouflage, a long-standing Chinese influence operation known to be as ineffective as it is widespread. Yet, there has been a shift in strategy in this election year in the United States, with the operation renamed “MAGAflage” by researchers at the London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue: An effort to align accounts more with their target audience rather than pump out the lazily crafted, badly translated Chinese talking points of before.
This changed tack — what, based on my years of studying Russian activities in the information space, I view as a “Russification” of China’s approach — is paying off.
For example, one of the accounts linked to MAGAflage spread a clip by state-controlled TV network Russia Today, peddling the Kremlin trope that neo-Nazis are fighting in Ukraine. It was reposted by Alex Jones, a far-right American conspiracy theorist with millions of followers, taking the Beijing-led operation previously lacking genuine engagement to garnering hundreds of thousands of clicks.
In addition to China learning from the Kremlin playbook of troll-farm-fueled influence operations, the overlap between Russian and Chinese tactics and goals also manifests in the amplification of each other’s narratives by their state media.
The Russian conspiracy theory that the U.S. is producing bioweapons is not new, having emerged at various points over the past decades, including when America was blamed for manufacturing AIDS or being behind disease-generating biolaboratories in the country of Georgia.
More recently, Russia has peddled disinformation about U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine creating bat coronaviruses to infect Russians, spreading the pathogens via specially trained birds. This wild tale was picked up by Chinese state media, including the Global Times, which published several infographics and articles explaining the purported threat.
Notable is the timing of the biolab narrative’s reemergence in both countries’ media — conveniently, just weeks after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022.
Mirroring this dynamic, Russian influencers pushed Chinese talking points about the Taiwanese presidential election that took place earlier this year on their channels. A report by Taiwan’s Doublethink Labs, a civil society organization, uncovered graphics featuring creative titles like “CIA wins Taiwanese elections” that were spread on popular Telegram channels with hundreds of thousands of Russian subscribers.
By implying that the win by the pro-autonomy Democratic Progressive Party was delivered not by the will of the Taiwanese people but rather by American masterminds, Russian and Chinese influence agents sought to undermine the legitimacy of Taiwanese democracy and sovereignty while alleging that the U.S. is conducting a proxy effort against the Chinese Communist Party.
Independently of each other, both Moscow and Beijing want to unseat the U.S. from its throne as global hegemon. It is advantageous to both to spread the narrative that Washington is the provocateur in today’s geopolitical mess.
American investigative outlet The Intercept has lifted any doubts as to whether the overlap between Chinese and Russian narratives is the fruit of coincidence or coordination — clarifying that this is more than a momentary marriage of convenience between Moscow and Beijing’s propaganda strategies, but a genuine strengthening of relations.
Through hacked emails of Russian state broadcaster VGTRK, journalists at The Intercept uncovered that in 2021, Beijing and Moscow penned a ministerial level agreement on media collaboration. Signatories included the heads of both countries’ most prominent state media, Russia’s Ministry of Digital Development, Communication and Mass Media, China’s National Radio and Television Administration, and even telecommunications giant Huawei.
Spelled out in the document is a mandate to collaborate on content and narratives across platforms, including social media. The agreement’s propagandistic nature is best summarized in these lines, translated from the Russian: “Both sides are determined and obliged to work in the sphere of information sharing, promoting objective, comprehensive and accurate coverage of the world’s most important events by the mass media of Russia and China for the audiences of both countries and the international information space,” leading to “mutually beneficial cooperation.”
The agreement does not explicitly map out joint covert influence operations, but the mutual amplification of narratives does create an echo chamber that spans media, platforms and networks. The goal is to create the illusion of an organic consensus stemming from multiple viewpoints, when in reality this is manufactured for world consumption in the halls of the Kremlin and Zhongnanhai, the Chinese leadership’s Beijing compound.
As Japan hastily works to address the threat that Chinese-sourced disinformation poses to its national security, an understanding of how the Russian information war works and inspires its Chinese counterpart is needed to develop a sound, hybrid defense. As China adopts best practices from and fine-tunes the Kremlin playbook, its influence operations’ effectiveness will surpass even Russia’s because its impact is reinforced by its other assets, such as economic prowess.
Former Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida famously stated that the Ukraine of today could be the East Asia of tomorrow, and there is nothing that conveys this scenario more than what is happening in the information space.
While we traditionally look to the conventional security domain to evaluate the status of international relations, cyberspace may too indicate where diplomatic efforts should be directed. Although Russia and China have not penned an official alliance, their activities are a clear indication of a joint goal to “fuzzify” the idea of truth at the expense of democratic systems like those of the U.S, Japan and, certainly, Ukraine and Taiwan.
