Chinese and Russians intensify their cooperation to control the Internet. In the spotlight, the undesirable information coming from the outside. The project was born in 2017 but efforts increased after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Particular attention is paid to the opposition movement of Aleksei Navalny.
Moscow () – The Russian Internet monitoring agency Roskomnadzor (RKN) has been exchanging information with its Chinese counterpart CAC for some time, a collaboration that began before the recent affectionate meeting between Putin and Xi Jinping. In 2022, the two countries had announced a “no limits” alliance, shortly before the Russian invasion of Ukraine began. In recent years, within the framework of the “System” research, currenttime and Radio Svoboda audio messages and memorandums of understanding on the subject of Sino-Russian computer censorship circulated.
From the collected material, it appears that in June 2017, RKN and CAC conducted joint assessments on the influence of the media on meetings organized by Aleksei Navalny’s movement. In 2019, the heads of both organizations spoke of the use of artificial intelligence to detect “prohibited content”. Subsequently, RKN began to use this type of technology, also signing a cooperation agreement with CAC, under which the Chinese counterpart asked the Russian institute to block all information that is unpleasant for China, in particular a page of the social network russian VKontakte in which the dances of the Uyghurs were shown.
In 2017, the then director of RKN, Aleksandr Žarov, had received a letter signed by the head of the social relations area of the Russian presidential office, Aleksandr Smirnov. The report’s researchers System had access to a copy of this letter. Žarov was invited to attend the third Russian-Chinese Media Forum, held on July 4 at the President Hotel in Moscow, as part of Xi Jinping’s official visit to Russia that same year.
In addition to the official meetings, at the request of the Chinese, there was a secret colloquium between the control bodies to “exchange experiences on Internet regulation.” On the Chinese side, the Vice Minister for Cyberspace, Ren Xianling, and three of his collaborators participated.
At the time, Žarov had proposed sending Chinese specialists to Russia to teach the Russians “highly effective” blocking and control techniques, especially the so-called “Great Firewall” with which the 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 against the outside world; Žarov himself claimed that 95% of the information banned in Russia was “of foreign origin”.
Since then, Russia has developed an increasingly vast Internet surveillance system, without losing contact with CAC, interested in understanding how Russians classify “prohibited information”, how collected personal data is processed, and how to get a “image positive” of Russia on the web, inside and outside the country.
Subsequently, the cooperation between Russians and Chinese focused on the protests of Navalny’s supporters, from 2017 to the present, starting with the film “Not your Dimon”, which destroyed the reputation of former president Dmitry Medvedev, when he was still serving. as prime minister. Due to the accusations, Medvedev fell into a depression and an alcoholism crisis, for which he was admitted to specialized clinics and later recovered in the “comfort zone” of the Kremlin power structures.
By May 2017, Putin’s popularity had fallen to around 50%, partly due to anti-corruption investigations. The Russians had lost the confidence they had shown during the referendum on the annexation of Crimea three years earlier. The escalation of the war with Ukraine also depends on this difficult period, and the “special military operations” served not only to recover fragments of territory from the “common Russian homeland”, but above all to restore the unanimity of the internal consensus through propaganda. and censorship. An art in which the Chinese are clearly masters, worldwide.
