Moscow and Beijing: 'limitless' partnership on censorship

Chinese and Russians step up cooperation on Internet control. Foreign sources of unwelcome information targeted. A project born in 2017 and strengthened after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Great focus on Aleksej Naval'nyj's opposition movement.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - Russia's Internet monitoring agency Roskomnadzor (Rkn) has been exchanging information with its Chinese counterpart Cac for some time, long before even the recent meeting of affectionate exchanges between Putin and Xi Jinping.

As early as 2022, the two countries announced the "no-holds-barred" partnership, shortly before Russia began its invasion of Ukraine. In recent years, with the "System" investigation, Currentime and Radio Svoboda have been sounding out audio messages and memoranda of understanding on the topic of Sino-Russian cyber censorship.

From the materials collected, it appears that in June 2017 Rkn and CaC conducted joint assessments of media influence in meetings organized by Aleksej Naval'nyj's movement. In 2019, the heads of the two agencies discussed the use of artificial intelligence to detect "forbidden content," and some time later Rkn began using such technologies, also signing a cooperation agreement with CaC, under which the Chinese counterpart asked the Russian institute to block all information it disliked, in particular a page on the Russian social network VKontakte where Uyghur dances were shown.

In 2017, the then head of Rkn, Aleksandr Žarov, had received a letter signed by the head of Russia's presidential administration for social relations, Aleksandr Smirnov, a copy of which ended up in Sistema's possession. Žarov was being invited to attend the third Russian-Chinese Media Forum, which was held on July 4 in Moscow's President Hotel, part of Xi Jinping's official visit to Russia that year.

In addition to the official meetings, a secret colloquium had been held between the regulatory agencies to "exchange experiences on regulating the Internet," at the suggestion of the Chinese, represented by Vice Minister for Cyberspace Ren Xianling and three of his associates.

At the time, Žarov had proposed sending Chinese specialists to Russia, to teach "highly efficient" blocking and control techniques, especially the so-called "Great Firewall" with which Chinese authorities censor Internet traffic. The Chinese in turn invited Russian specialists to Beijing, to see for themselves how their system works to defend themselves from the outside; Žarov himself claimed that 95 percent of the banned information in Russia was "foreign-made."

Since then, Russia has developed an increasingly widespread system of monitoring the Internet, without losing contact with CaC, which is interested in understanding how Russians classify "banned information," how the personal data collected is processed, and how a "positive image" of Russia, inside and outside the country, is managed to be produced on the network.

Cooperation between the Russians and the Chinese then focused on the protests of the navalnists, from 2017 to the present, starting with the film "Not Your Dimon," which destroyed the reputation of former President Dmitry Medvedev, then still prime minister. Depression over the allegations led Medvedev to a severe bout of alcoholism, for which he was admitted to specialized clinics and then recovered in the "comfort zone" of the Kremlin's power structures.

By May 2017, partly due to the anti-corruption investigations, Putin's popularity had dropped to around 50 percent, losing the plebiscitary confidence of the Crimean annexation three years earlier. The escalation of war with Ukraine also depends on that difficult period, and "special military operations" serve not only to regain fragments of territory of the "common Russian homeland," but more importantly to reestablish unanimity of domestic consensus through propaganda and censorship. Arts in which the Chinese are certainly global masters.