After a year of war in Ukraine, China and Russia have drawn closer together in the news space, often repeating each other's positions in state media as part of a broader strategy of undermining the West, a new report says.
A year-long study by the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund showed that messages from Chinese officials and the media have been evaluated since Moscow launched its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, in order to gave greater "rhetorical cover to the Kremlin" despite Beijing's official position that it is a neutral side in the conflict, writes the editorial staff of Radio Free Europe in English.
"There has definitely been a pro-Russian tilt and China has been repeating pro-Russian positions since the beginning of the war, at the same time downplaying Russia's war crimes and giving importance to Russian voices," one of the report's authors, Etienne Soula, a research analyst at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, told RFE/RL.
Given that growing overlap, the report, published on February 24, said China's "ability to use its global network of influence to undermine the West" gives Beijing a particularly powerful role in shaping the attitudes of undecided countries in the global south.
"To weaken Western democracies and their allies, China has also sought to isolate those countries by reaching out to the Global South," the report said. "In the context of the war in Ukraine, Chinese messages consistently claim that countries that support Ukraine are hypocritical and indifferent to the rest of the world."
War year
China's tightly controlled media refrained from calling the invasion a war and instead used the Kremlin's terminology, calling the aggression a "special military operation." In other cases, Chinese media have pushed disinformation and conspiracy theories popularized on Russian state channels, such as that the US has bioweapons laboratories in Ukraine, that the killings of civilians by Russian forces in the town of Buch was a hoax, and that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is controlled by American billionaire George Soros.
After nearly a decade of anti-Western propaganda and deepening ties between Russia and China that the two countries characterized as a "borderless" partnership ahead of the invasion of Ukraine, China's state-controlled media outlets have helped spread the Kremlin's war narrative to their vast domestic audience. and abroad.
According to the report's analysis, this is repeated across social media as well.
Between February 24, 2022 and January 23, 2023, Chinese diplomatic accounts as well as state media Twitter accounts quoted Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov "more than three times" more than Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba. . Also, Russian President Vladimir Putin was mentioned eight times more than Zelensky.
According to the report, the repetition of Russian narratives in the Chinese media also provided an opportunity to criticize the US and reinforce Beijing's previous claims about US foreign policy.
In the first year of the war, Chinese diplomatic and state media Twitter accounts mentioned the US twice as often as Russia when mentioning "war" and placed a greater focus on NATO, which was "unusual in Chinese media attacks before the war".
In 2021, according to data collected by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, Chinese state media mentioned NATO in more than 1.200 tweets, while the alliance's "expansion" was mentioned in just 52 tweets. Since the beginning of the Russian invasion, mentions of NATO have increased by more than 540 percent, and NATO expansion by 1.700 percent.
Taiwan is another topic whose mentions have risen sharply since the beginning of the Russian invasion last year, although in a way that has proved inconvenient for China's rapprochement with Russia in the information space.
The self-governing island claimed by China was mentioned along with Ukraine in tweets on Chinese accounts more than 500 times, although the report said the vast majority were attempts by Chinese officials or the media to dismiss comparisons between Ukraine and Taiwan.
Beijing views Taiwan as a rogue province and often cites respect for China's "sovereignty and territorial integrity" as reasons why other countries should not cooperate with Taiwan as an independent state.
"China's support for Russia is not unequivocal. The red line is that China's interests come first no matter what," Sula said. "This is quite clear whenever he mentions Taiwan, and the messages are unwavering in emphasizing that Ukraine and Taiwan are not the same, and thus in a way rejecting Russia's narrative."
China and Russia in the Global South
The report's findings echo comments made by James Rubin (James), coordinator of the Global Engagement Center, a US State Department body established to "expose and counter" foreign propaganda and disinformation - during a visit to Europe in early March, when he warned that the West reacted slowly to the emergence of China in the information space and Beijing's close ties with Russia.
"We as a country and the West have been slow to react and ... we are facing a very, very big challenge," Rubin told reporters on February 28. "In the communication space, the agreement between China and Russia is almost complete."
China and Russia have invested heavily in the past decade to attract new audiences across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia, and Rubin says both countries have spent billions to expand their operations globally.
Chinese state media have been central to Beijing's efforts to influence other countries, control information about the Chinese Communist Party, and reinforce China's narratives about its politics and role in the world.
In the context of the war in Ukraine, these narratives seem to have found fertile ground in the global South. A poll conducted at the end of February by the European Council on Foreign Relations showed that while the vast majority of Western countries support Ukraine, those polled across the Global South are less supportive of the continuation of the war, and are more likely to be sympathetic to Moscow's grievances and be suspicious of the motives of Western leaders.
Sula says this means the growing rapprochement between Beijing and Moscow will expand, even if the two countries' positions may not match on every issue.
"The information space is easy to exploit. No one is saying that they will impose sanctions on China because it supports Russia there," he said. "It makes Russia happy and also serves Beijing's broader interests by accelerating the decline of Western influence in places like Africa, where only China really has the capacity to fill the void left by Western powers."
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