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Echoes of China’s Russia’s Alternate Reality Intensify Around the World


When Twitter put a warning message on top of a Russian government post denying civilian deaths in Bucha, Ukraine, last week, Chinese state media rushed to defend it. “The statement by @mfa_russia on #Bucha has been censored on Twitter,” wrote Frontline, a Twitter account associated with China’s official English-language broadcaster CGTN.

An article in the Chinese Communist Party newspaper reported that the Russians presented conclusive evidence to prove that the horrific photos of corpses on the streets of Bucha, a suburb of the Ukrainian capital Kiev, were a hoax.

A party television station in Shanghai said that the Ukrainian government had created dire pictures to gain sympathy in the West. “Clearly, such evidence is unacceptable in court,” the report said.

Just a month ago the White House warned China will not reinforce Russia’s campaign to spread disinformation about the war in Ukraine. Even as Russia faces new condemnation for the killings and other atrocities in Bucha in recent days, China’s efforts have intensified anyway, contradicting and contradicting the policies of NATO capitals.

The result was to create an alternate reality of war – not only for consumption by Chinese citizens but also for a global audience.

Propaganda has challenged Western efforts to isolate Russia diplomatically, especially in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, which are fertile ground for conspiracy theories and mistrust of the United States.

“Russia and China have long shared a common mistrust and hostility towards the West,” said analyst Bret Schafer, who monitors disinformation for the United States. Alliance to Secure Democracya non-profit group based in Washington. “In Ukraine, it’s one level above that – to the extent that they read pretty specific and in some cases pretty hard-hitting claims from Russia as parrot-like.”

China’s campaign has further undermined the country’s effort to present itself as a neutral actor eager to promote a peaceful resolution to the war.

In fact, its diplomats and official journalists have become combatants in the information war to legitimize Russia’s claims and discredit international concerns about what appears to be war crimes.

Since the war began, they have parroted the Kremlin’s rationales, including the allegation that President Vladimir V. Putin was fighting a neo-Nazi government in Kiev. On Twitter alone, they used the word “Nazi” as Russia’s rallying cry, more times in the six weeks of the war than in the previous six months. a database It was created by the Alliance to Secure Democracy.

In one example on Wednesday, an official from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted a tampered photo It appears to show the Nazis holding a swastika flag next to the flags of Ukraine and the United States. “Surprisingly, the US stands by the neo-Nazis!” Official Li Yang wrote about the image that originally featured a neo-Nazi flag instead of the American flag.

The timing and themes of many of the themes that stand out in the countries coverage point to coordination, or at least a shared view of the world and the leading role of the United States in this world. For example, China’s attacks on the United States and the NATO alliance are now very close to those of the Russian state media blaming the West for the war.

Sometimes even phrases in English for global audiences are almost the same.

after youtube forbidden Two Russian television channels, RT and Sputnik, are both rated for content that “minimizes or trivializes well-documented violence.” RT and Front line accused the platform of hypocrisy. They did this using the same videos of former American officials, including Presidents George W. Bush, Presidents Barack Obama, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, joking about weapons, drones, and the killing of former Libyan leader Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi.

In another example, the same accounts included a video in 1997 showing Joseph R. Biden Jr. warning that NATO’s eastward expansion could provoke a “violent and hostile” response from Russia, arguing that Putin’s decision to go to war was justified. used.

China’s efforts made it clear that the White House’s warning had little impact on Beijing. China’s propagandists instead intensified their efforts, reinforcing not only the Kremlin’s broad views on the war, but also the most blatant lies about the conduct of the war.

“If you’re only looking at printouts, then that message didn’t arrive,” said Mr. Schafer. “If anything, we’ve seen them double down.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on China’s support for Russian disinformation.

While the extent of any direct collusion on war propaganda between the Russians and the Chinese remains unclear, the cooperation in the reach of the international media goes back almost a decade.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping pledged to deepen ties between Russian and Chinese state media during his first foreign visit to Moscow in 2013. Since then, numerous state media outlets of the two countries have signed dozens of commitments to share content.

Sputnik alone has reached 17 deals with major Chinese media. According to Vasily V. Pushkov, director of international cooperation at state company Rossiya Segodnya, which owns and operates Sputnik, in 2021 his articles were shared more than 2,500 times by major Chinese media.

The two also took other clues from each other.

In mid-March, after Russia Today, Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson’s clips were released in the US. Biological weapons development in UkraineChinese state media has also started receiving Mr. Carlson’s broadcasts.

On March 26, Mr. Carlson was quoted on China’s flagship nightly news broadcast, saying “it appears that our government has been funding biolabs in Ukraine for some time now.” The next day, the English-language broadcaster CGTN repeated Russia’s claim that it had connected laboratories to the laptops of the American president’s son, Hunter Biden.

Russian and Chinese state media are also increasingly drawing on the insights of the same group of internet celebrities, experts and influencers, and feature them in their shows alongside their YouTube videos. One of them, Benjamin Norton, is a journalist who claims that a US government-sponsored coup d’état took place in Ukraine in 2014 and US officials appointed the leaders of the current Ukrainian government.

He first explained the conspiracy theory. RT, but it was later picked up by Chinese state media and tweeted by accounts like Frontline. In an interview with China’s state broadcaster, Mr Norton, in March, CCTV, He said that the US, not Russia, was responsible for the invasion of Russia.

“Concerning the current situation in Ukraine, Benjamin said that this was not a war caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but a war planned and provoked by the United States as early as 2014,” an unnamed CCTV narrator said.

At times, China’s information campaigns have appeared to contradict the country’s official diplomatic statements, undermining efforts to downplay links between China’s relationship with Russia and the brutal invasion. On Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian described the footage from Bucha as “disturbing” and urged all parties to “restrain restraint and avoid false accusations”.

Just the day before, Chen Weihua, a vocal and prolific editor at the Chinese government’s China Daily, seemed to be doing just that. He retweeted a widely shared post that said there was “not one iota” of the massacre at Bucha and accused the West of “staging atrocities to heighten emotions, demonize enemies and prolong wars.”

Mr. Chen is one of a sprawling network of diplomats, government-controlled media and state-sponsored experts and influencers who have expanded his narrative of China’s internal conflict to overseas platforms like Twitter and Facebook. At the heart of their message is that the US and NATO, not Putin, are responsible for the war.

A political cartoon shared by state media and Chinese diplomats depicted the European Union as kidnapped by Uncle Sam and chained to a tank with a NATO flag. Russia’s St. Another of the Chinese diplomats in St. Petersburg showed a stuffed star-and-stick arm on the back of a European Union puppet waving a spear.

Other images showing the European Union as a lackey of the United States have emerged from a number of official Chinese accounts. a tense meeting Between China’s Mr Xi and the European Union, where Europe has urged China not to break Western sanctions or support Russia’s war.

Maria Repnikova, a professor of global communications at Georgia State University who works on China and Russia’s information campaigns, said the two countries had a “common vision of resentment towards the West” that sparked nationalist sentiments in their respective countries. At the same time, the shared messages resonated globally, especially outside the United States and Europe.

He said of the views in Africa and other parts of the world, “When it comes to this war, it’s echoes of a similar kind of concern or stance, not coordination.” “China is also trying to show that it is not isolated.”

Claire Fu contributed to research.





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