When Twitter posted a warning message to a Russian government post last week denying the civilian killings in Bucha, Ukraine, Chinese state media rushed to defense. “On Twitter @mfa_russia’s statement about #Bucha was censored,” wrote Frontline, a Twitter account associated with China’s official English-language broadcaster, CGTN.
A Chinese Communist Party newspaper reported that Russians had provided definitive evidence to prove that the gruesome photographs of bodies in the streets of Bucha, a suburb of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, were fraudulent.
A party television station in Shanghai said the Ukrainian government created the horrific scenes to win sympathy in the West. “Clearly, such evidence is not admissible in court,” the report said.
Just a month ago, the White House warned China not to step up Russia’s campaign to sow disinformation about the war in Ukraine. In any case, Chinese efforts have intensified, going against and challenging the policies of NATO capitals, even as Russia has been condemned again in recent days for the Bucha killings and other atrocities.
The result was to create an alternate reality of war – not just for the consumption of Chinese citizens, but also for a global audience.
The propaganda has tested Western efforts to diplomatically isolate Russia, particularly in the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, which have been fertile ground for conspiracy theories and mistrust of the United States.
“Russia and China have long shared mistrust and hostility toward the West,” said Bret Schafer, a disinformation analyst for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a Washington-based nonprofit. “In Ukraine, it’s a level above that — just the extent to which they’ve mimicked some pretty specific and in some cases pretty far-fetched claims made by Russia.”
China’s campaign has further undermined the country’s efforts to present itself as a neutral actor in the war, seeking to promote a peaceful solution.
In fact, its diplomats and official journalists have become fighters in the information war to legitimize Russia’s claims and discredit international concerns about what appear to be war crimes.
Since the start of the war, they have echoed the Kremlin’s justifications, including President Vladimir V. Putin’s claim that he was fighting a neo-Nazi government in Kiev. On Twitter alone, they’ve used the word “Nazi” — which Russia uses as a rallying cry — in the six weeks of the war so far than in the six months before, according to a database created by the Alliance for Securing Democracy.
In an example on Wednesday, an official from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs an edited photo tweeted it appears that Nazis are holding a swastika flag next to flags of Ukraine and the United States. “Surprisingly, the US is behind the neo-Nazis!” the official, Li Yang, wrote about the image, which originally featured a neo-Nazi flag instead of the US flag.
The timing and topics of many of the themes that feature prominently in the countries’ coverage suggest coordination or at least a shared view of the world and the United States’ preeminent role in it. China’s attacks on the United States and the NATO alliance, for example, now align closely with those in Russian state media blaming the West for the war.
Sometimes even the wording – in English for a global audience – is almost identical.
After YouTube forbidden RT and Sputnik, two Russian television channels, for content that minimizes or trivializes well-documented violent events. RT and frontline accused the platform of hypocrisy. They did so with the same videos of former US officials, including President George W. Bush, President Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton, making fun of weapons, drones and the assassination of former Libyan leader Colonel Muammar el-Gaddafi.
In another instance, the same accounts used a video by Joseph R. Biden Jr. who warned in 1997 that NATO’s eastward expansion could provoke a “vigorous and hostile” response from Russia to suggest that Mr Putin’s decision to go to war was justified.
China’s efforts have made it clear that the White House warning has had little effect on Beijing. China’s propagandists have instead stepped up their efforts, reinforcing not only the Kremlin’s broad views on the war, but also some of the most blatant lies about its conduct.
“If you just look at the output, that message didn’t get through,” said Mr Schafer. “If anything, we’ve seen them do some sort of double.”
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about China’s support of Russian disinformation.
While the extent of any direct collusion between Russians and Chinese over war propaganda remains uncertain, the roots of collaboration in the international media stretch back nearly a decade.
The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, promised to deepen ties between Russian and Chinese state media during his first foreign trip in 2013 – to Moscow. Since then, the two countries’ numerous state media bodies have signed dozens of pledges to share content.
Sputnik alone has 17 agreements with major Chinese media outlets. According to Vasily V. Pushkov, international cooperation director of Rossiya Segodnya, the state-owned company that owns and operates Sputnik, the articles were shared more than 2,500 times by major Chinese media in 2021.
War between Russia and Ukraine: important developments
The two have also taken other cues from each other.
In mid-March, after Russia Today began using excerpts from Fox News host Tucker Carlson to support the idea that the United States was developing bioweapons in Ukraine, Chinese state media began picking up Mr. Carlson’s broadcasts.
On March 26, Mr. Carlson was quoted in China’s top nightly newscast as claiming that “it appears that our government has been funding biolabs in Ukraine for some time.” The next day, the English-language channel CGTN repeated a Russian claim linking the labs to the laptops of Hunter Biden, the US president’s son.
Russian and Chinese state media have also increasingly tapped into the views of the same group of internet celebrities, experts and influencers, both in their shows and YouTube videos. One of them, Benjamin Norton, is a journalist who claimed that a US government-sponsored coup d’état took place in Ukraine in 2014 and that US officials installed the leaders of the current Ukrainian government.
He first explained the conspiracy theory on RT, though it was later picked up by Chinese state media and tweeted by accounts like Frontline. In an interview in March with Mr. Norton, that the Chinese state broadcaster, CCTV,† He said the United States, not Russia, was responsible for the Russian invasion.
“Regarding the current situation in Ukraine, Benjamin said that this is not a war caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but a war that has been planned and provoked by the United States as early as 2014,” said an unnamed CCTV operator. narrator.
At times, China’s information campaigns seemed to contradict the country’s official diplomatic statements, undermining China’s efforts to downplay the ties between its relationship with Russia and the brutal invasion. On Wednesday, Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, called the images from Bucha “disturbing” and asked all parties “to exercise restraint and avoid baseless accusations”.
Just the day before, Chen Weihua, a vocal and prolific editor at the Chinese government-owned China Daily, appeared to be doing just that. He retweeted a widespread message that there was not “one iota” of evidence of massacre in Bucha and accused the West of “organizing atrocities to boost emotions, demonize opponents and expand wars”.
Mr Chen is part of a sprawling network of diplomats, government-controlled media and state-backed experts and influencers who have expanded China’s domestic narrative on the conflict to foreign platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Central to their message is that the United States and NATO, not Mr Putin, are responsible for the war.
A political cartoon, shared by state media and Chinese diplomats, depicted the European Union kidnapped by Uncle Sam and chained to a tank bearing a NATO flag. Another, from a Chinese diplomat in St. Petersburg, Russia, showed an arm with a star-and-barred sleeve tucked into the back of a European Union puppet brandishing a spear.
Other images portraying the European Union as a lackey of the United States emerged from a number of official Chinese accounts in the run-up to a tense meeting between Mr Xi of China and the European Union, in which Europe called on China not to undermine Western sanctions or support war.
Maria Repnikova, a professor of global communications at Georgia State University who studies information campaigns about China and Russia, said the two countries have “a shared vision of hating the West” that fuels nationalist sentiment at home. At the same time, the shared messages have resonated worldwide, especially outside the United States and Europe.
“It’s not coordination, but echoes of similar concerns or positions when it comes to this war,” she said of views in Africa and other parts of the world. “China is also trying to show that it is not isolated.”
Claire Fu research contributed.
