The war in Ukraine is a new laboratory for Russian-Chinese cooperation in the manipulation of information: since the start of the Russian invasion on February 24, Beijing’s propaganda has openly played the short-scale of that carried out by Moscow. . In this context, China does not fail to use, in the direction of Westerners, social networks inaccessible to its population, in particular Twitter and Facebook.
On Twitter, the nationalist daily GlobalTimes, controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), thus relayed Russian disinformation that President Volodymyr Zelensky had left his country. This was the case on Friday March 4 with the hashtag #ukrainetensions. The message repeated an assertion, false, broadcast by the Russian agency Sputnik, which quoted the president of the Duma. As early as February 26, a tweet accused the Ukrainian head of state of having fled Kiev for Lviv – “Zelensky had already left the Ukrainian capital yesterday,” even assured CGTN, the big Chinese state channel.
During this war, “We must note the deepening of the coordination between the two countries, which have recently learned to act in concert on disinformation and to exchange stories, as we saw in Hong Kong”, emphasizes Paul Charon, researcher at the Institute for Strategic Research at the Military School (Irsem), co-author ofa comprehensive report on Chinese influence operations. “The Chinese are no longer hiding, they have mobilized their spokespersons strongly and are repeating the Russian narrative and vocabulary word for word, evoking for example the “empire of lies” that would be the United States, an expression used by the President Vladimir Putin, says Mr. Charon.
US analysts at Axios have shown that Beijing had bought, in recent days, advertising space on Facebook for the benefit of Russiain order to circumvent the censorship of Russian state media Sputnik and RT on the social network. “Many of these commercials, mostly CGTN television clips, play out the pro-Russian and anti-NATO elements and downplay Russia’s role in the invasion of its neighbour,” writes Ashley Gold.
“Internal motives”
Chinese propaganda has also revived one of its favorite disinformation operations, accusing the United States of manufacturing biological weapons. “China is urging the United States to reveal details about the bio-labs it is funding in Ukraine, including the types of viruses stored and the research that has been conducted,” launched, Tuesday, March 8, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian. China’s official news agency, Xinhua, detailed the pseudo-enterprise citing plague, cholera, antrax and rabbit fever. In doing so, Beijing is in line with its 2020-2021 operation on Covid-19: it had accused the United States of having manufactured SARS-CoV-2 in the military laboratory at Fort Detrick – a manipulation itself copied from that launched by the KGB in 1983 to suggest that AIDS was an American creation.
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