When Chinese leader Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Beijing Winter Olympics last month, the two men gestured at something bigger than a photo opportunity. They issued a joint statement that spoke of reshaping the international order, and buried within that diplomatic language was a specific promise: a shared project to rewire the global information landscape. It was a quiet, almost technical ambition, but the full weight of it became clear just days later, when Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine. For years, Beijing and Moscow had been building a parallel universe of news, data, and internet control—a universe governed not by citizens or open networks, but by state authority. As the world watched the tragedy unfold in real time, the strangely synchronized propaganda coming from both capitals revealed the depth of that collaboration. Neither Xi nor Putin invented this partnership overnight; it had been cultivated through a decade of agreements, technical exchanges, and a very personal conviction that the West was using information to hold them down. Their joint statement simply made the project official. And now, under the glare of war, we are all seeing the architecture they have built together, and what it means for the rest of us.
The heart of this project begins at home, in the vast machinery of domestic internet control. Xi Jinping has invested his political future in the idea that he alone can restore China to its rightful global greatness after two centuries of Western dominance—a vision he calls the “Great Rejuvenation.” A core part of this narrative is the belief that China’s rise is threatened by a conspiracy of Western information containment. Thus, over the past few years, as trade, technology, human rights, and even the pandemic have soured relations with Washington and Brussels, Beijing has gone on a narrative offensive. Through state-run media and a swarm of new digital propaganda products, it relentlessly attacks Western hypocrisy, Western social dysfunction, and, above all, the “anti-China” lies of the Western media. But China did not have to go it alone. In Russia, it found an eager companion—a country with its own formidable disinformation machine and a long history of information control. Though their interests are not perfectly identical, they have grown closer in their shared authoritarian vision of internet governance. They now push for what they call “cyber sovereignty,” meaning that the internet should be subject to the control of individual states, not the decentralized, open system we currently inhabit. Putin was one of the first to sign onto this vision. Over the past decade, high-level Chinese and Russian internet officials have met regularly, sharing technical expertise. In May 2019, Russia hosted Chinese officials including Fang Binxing, the computer scientist widely credited with building China’s great firewall. That same month, Putin signed a “sovereign internet” law that allows the Russian government to cut the country off from the global web by routing traffic through state-controlled infrastructure. We saw that principle put into action in recent days, as Russia blocked Facebook and Twitter. For Xi and Putin, this is not about simple censorship; it is about creating a global norm that makes their domestic controls look reasonable, even legitimate. And they are taking that fight to international bodies, most recently with a Chinese proposal, backed by Russia, to overhaul the internet’s governance structure in favor of centralized state power.
But the most insidious part of this alliance is the way they have merged their propaganda machines. For years, Chinese state media and their Russian counterparts have been signing content-sharing agreements, so that the stories you read in Beijing are, in effect, written in Moscow. It started in 2013, when Putin and Xi oversaw a cooperation deal between Voice of Russia and People’s Daily Online. A year later, Russia Today and People’s Daily followed suit, agreeing to share online news resources. Then Xinhua, China’s official news agency, signed an agreement with RT. These deals were justified as steps toward a “multipolar, pluralistic world,” but in practice they have created a pipeline of pure Russian narrative into Chinese newsrooms. During the buildup to the invasion of Ukraine, this pipeline worked overtime. For instance, in 2021, the People’s Daily’s only substantial report on the tensions at the border simply translated Kremlin talking points, citing Russia’s TASS agency to claim that NATO activity was forcing Russia to remain vigilant—never mentioning the 100,000 troops massing on Ukraine’s border. Russian stories about Ukraine’s supposed lack of support for NATO, the alleged Western-backed coup, and the so-called genocide in Donbas have circulated on major Chinese news sites, often with no attribution or fact-checking. Even stories unrelated to Europe were warped to serve Russian interests. A December piece about a Russia-ASEAN naval exercise was framed as a “strong retort” to NATO, echoing Russian propaganda. Chinese media have faithfully repeated Russian claims about biological weapons labs in Ukraine, and have instructed journalists to use only official sources that are, in turn, shaped by Russian narratives. This means that the Chinese public, increasingly cut off from the global web and fed this steady diet of Russian disinformation, is being prepared to see the West, and specifically NATO, as the true aggressor in Ukraine.
The consequences of this propaganda collaboration are visible across Chinese cyberspace. On Weibo and WeChat, the dominant themes are not of horror at the war, but of support for Russia and adulation for Putin. Comments rage about “glorious Russia” and “glorious Putin,” with some users describing him as a great historical figure. Many see Russia as a shield for China, believing that if Russia falls, China is next. “I support the disintegration of NATO! I support Russia!” reads one typical comment. Another says, “Russia has done a beautiful job!” That might sound like the fringe of online nationalism, but it is the mainstream view in China today, and it has been carefully cultivated by the media environment. There are, of course, voices calling for peace, but they are drowned out by the pro-war sentiment, and sometimes met with censorship. Chinese officials have avoided calling it a war, and have restricted any substantive discussion that might challenge the official narrative. So, ordinary Chinese people—many of whom genuinely believe they are seeing the truth—are being radicalized in real time. They have been told for years that the West is corrupt, hypocritical, and hell-bent on containing China, so when Russia invades Ukraine, they view it as a justified blow against Western arrogance. The only voices of dissent they hear are those of Western governments, which they have been trained to distrust. It is a closed loop, and it is doing exactly what Putin and Xi hoped it would do: creating a domestic audience that validates their foreign policy, no matter how brutal it becomes.
Yet, even as this propaganda machine hums, there are signs of strain in the alliance. China, after all, has no real interest in a long, bloody European war that could destabilize the global economy or push Western powers into a closer alliance. That is why Beijing abstained in the UN vote to condemn Russia’s invasion, rather than vetoing it alongside Moscow—a small signal that it wanted to maintain some distance. Some analysts saw this as a hint that China might try to mediate, to cool the situation down. But China’s leadership is in a trap of its own making. By selling Russian propaganda wholesale to the Chinese people for months, by staking its domestic credibility on the Kremlin’s version of events, it has made it nearly impossible to change course now. If Xi were to suddenly condemn Putin’s aggression or acknowledge the Russian military’s atrocities, he would undermine the very narrative he has been pushing—that Russia is a righteous ally against Western evil. And he would risk a rupture with his only strategic partner in the fight to control global information. So we see the Chinese state doubling down, repeating Russian lies about biological weapons, refusing to call the invasion a war, and shielding its citizens from the uncomfortable reality. The pressure will only grow as the crisis drags on and the death toll rises. The world will demand China take a stand. But Beijing’s stand has already been taken, by default, through a decade of quietly building an information alliance with Moscow.
In the end, this story is not just about geopolitics; it is about people. It is about the Chinese citizen who reads a government newspaper that tells him Russians are defending themselves against NATO aggression, and who feels genuine outrage at the West. It is about the Russian soldier who believes he is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, because his state-run media told him so. It is about the Ukrainian family whose suffering is being dismissed or justified by people thousands of miles away, who cannot see their reality through the fog of state propaganda. And it is about the broader danger that the Xi-Putin partnership poses to a free and open internet—a space that, for all its flaws, still allows ordinary people to find alternative stories, to question their leaders, and to connect across borders. That space is under deliberate assault. The two men have set out to reshape the global information order, and they are well on their way. The fact that they are doing it in the name of sovereignty and national security does not make it less chilling. As the war in Ukraine continues, and as we see Chinese and Russian media speaking with one voice, we must understand that this is not merely a temporary propaganda campaign. It is a long-term project to make authoritarian control of information the global standard—a project that, if successful, would make crises like Ukraine even harder to see, even harder to resist, and even harder to end. The question now is whether the rest of the world, including the democracies who still hold out hope for an open internet, will wake up to the scale of that ambition before it is too late.