China In Eurasia

Welcome back to the China In Eurasia briefing, an RFE/RL newsletter tracking China's resurgent influence from Eastern Europe to Central Asia. To subscribe, click here.

I'm RFE/RL correspondent Reid Standish and here's what I'm following right now.

Xi's Global China Playbook

After three years of "zero-COVID" isolation, China is stepping out onto the global stage to a far more unfriendly West and using its growing economic and military power to shape the world to better suit its interests.

Finding Perspective: This more assertive footing was on display in March, with Beijing surprising much of the world by brokering a diplomatic deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia, one of the world's most volatile rivalries.

Xi has also continued to press ahead with China's peacemaker status for the war in Ukraine after unveiling a 12-point proposal for how to broker a cease-fire. The plan has largely been dismissed in the West but is gathering support from large players in the Global South.

The Chinese leader also drew the world's attention with a three-day visit to Moscow, where he reaffirmed Chinese support for Russian President Vladimir Putin and, among other developments, Russia increased its reliance on China's yuan as it seeks to move away from Western currencies, particularly the U.S. dollar.

PODCAST: Emmanuel Macron Hopes to dissuade Xi Jinping from supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while also developing European trade ties with Beijing. Can the French president’s diplomatic push succeed? Rikard Jozwiak, RFE/RL’s Europe editor, joins Reid Standish to discuss.

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Can Macron Convince Xi To Put Pressure On Putin?

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Beijing's Middle East moves and efforts to undermine the U.S. dollar globally also moved ahead, with China saying that it was open to talks with Malaysia on forming an Asian Monetary Fund, which would increase use of the yuan.

Elsewhere, Saudi Aramco, Riyadh's state energy company, said that an oil refinery it's building in China is expected to be fully operational by 2026, which comes after the kingdom announced in 2022 that it would be open to accepting yuan instead of dollars for Chinese oil sales.

In another development at the end of March, the Saudi Council of Ministers officially approved a proposal to join the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Beijing-led bloc for Eurasia. Saudi membership -- coupled with Iran, who is also slated to join -- could give the SCO added energy sway with a trio of Moscow, Riyadh, and Tehran.

Why It Matters: There's still plenty of room for skepticism that the above will lead to lasting breakthroughs, but Xi's willingness to move boldly marks a new phase in China's vision for itself and its role in the world.

It also sends a message that Beijing and like-minded countries no longer have to conform to the U.S.-led global order and that increasingly substantial alternatives are being put on offer.

Expert Corner: Brussels Looks For A New China Line

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen outlined her vision for the future of EU-China relations during a high-profile speech in Brussels on March 30. The full comments can be found here, but I've selected a few noteworthy passages:

"Far from being put off by the atrocious and illegal invasion of Ukraine, President Xi is maintaining his 'no-limits friendship' with Putin. But there has been a change of dynamic in the relationship between China and Russia. It is clear from this visit that China sees Putin's weakness as a way to increase its leverage over Russia. And it is clear that the power balance in that relationship -- which for most of the last century favored Russia -- has now reversed.

"We have to be frank on this point. How China continues to interact with Putin's war will be a determining factor for EU-China relations going forward.

"I believe it is neither viable -- nor in Europe's interest -- to decouple from China. Our relations are not black or white -- and our response cannot be either. This is why we need to focus on de-risk -- not decouple.

"But I also want to say that nothing is inevitable in geopolitics. China is a fascinating and complex mix of history, progress and challenges. And it will define this century. But our story about how we relate to China is not yet fully written -- and it need not be a defensive one. We must collectively show that our democratic system, our values and our open economy can deliver prosperity and security for people."

Do you have a question about China's growing footprint in Eurasia? Send it to me at StandishR@rferl.org or reply directly to this e-mail and I'll get it answered by leading experts and policymakers.

Three More Stories From Eurasia

1. Macron In China

French President Emmanuel Macron arrived in Beijing on April 5 along with von der Leyen for a three-day visit as Europe tries to find a balance between its concerns over China's geopolitical moves and its economic ambitions for the country.

What You Need To Know: As I reported here, Macron is looking to add a more personal touch to his discussions with Xi as part of an ambitious diplomatic push to create distance between the Chinese leader and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Speaking ahead of the visit to Beijing, Macron said his goal was to "try and involve China as much as possible to put pressure on Russia" on topics such as nuclear weapons, with aides saying Macron will try to gauge Xi's reaction to Russia's threat to host nuclear missiles in Belarus.

EU officials who spoke to RFE/RL said that expectations were low within the bloc for Macron's moves to work, but the diplomatic gambit is part of a long-standing fascination from the French president on the need for Europe to keep a distance between Beijing and Moscow.

More so, even with criticism within the bloc toward China rising, there is still a belief that Brussels will need to preserve some kind of functional relationship with Beijing in the future to tackle pressing issues.

2. Watching Taiwan

With tensions high with Beijing, U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy has confirmed that he will meet with Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on April 5 as she returns from a tour of Taiwan's allies in Central America.

The Details: Ahead of the visit, China staged military drills in the East China Sea and has repeatedly warned against any official contact between the U.S. and Taiwanese authorities.

The meeting in California comes after some notable recent developments. On March 30, Marketa Pekarova Adamova, the speaker of the Czech parliament's lower house, finished a trip where she led a delegation of more than 150 business leaders and officials to Taiwan as part of Prague's growing outreach to Taipei.

While that visit was under way, former Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou made a historic trip to China, where he called for people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait to work together for peace because "we are all Chinese."

The symbolism of Ma -- who served as president from 2008 to 2016 -- traveling to China is significant, and he drew protesters to the airport in Taipei, who saw his visit as a form of capitulation to Beijing.

In the run-up to Taiwan's presidential election in early 2024, the series of visits have thrown up a host of questions about how Taiwanese politics is dealing with China and with the United States -- the two most significant foreign factors for Taiwan's future.

3. Same Game, New Rules

The ripple effects of China and Russia moving closer together are already being felt around the world, and as I reported here, those changes are being felt strongly in Central Asia, especially after Xi's recent visit to Moscow.

What It Means: The Kremlin traditionally viewed Central Asia as its strategic backyard, but has been displaced by China as the premier economic force for the region's five countries. Moscow's war in Ukraine has also released geopolitical and economic shock waves and seen China's role in the region grow through diplomatic summits and new initiatives.

Following the Xi-Putin meeting in late March, Xi announced that he would host a summit with the other Central Asian leaders in May. While China has hosted virtual summits with the region before, it would be the first in-person gathering at the top-level.

But Central Asia's story does not -- and never really has -- fully fit with one of Chinese and Russian competition. While each side has their own interests, the region is one that represents major overlap for Beijing and Moscow, a trend that was reinforced in Xi and Putin's joint statement in Moscow, where they said they would work together "to support the countries of Central Asia in ensuring their sovereignty and national development" and safeguard them against so-called "color revolutions and external interference in the affairs of the region.

Across The Supercontinent

Little Room For Maneuver: White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan spoke with China's top diplomat Wang Yi on March 28 in what was reportedly a tense exchange that showed no sign of tensions subsiding.

The New Art Circles: Celebrity Russian maestro Valery Gergiyev has been fired and blocked by many cultural institutions in Europe and the United States because of his long record of support for Putin, but he recently received a warm welcome in China.

Gergiyev played a series of sold out shows in Beijing from March 27-29 that Chinese state media hailed as the beginning of a new era of cultural ties between China and Russia.

Belt And Road Woes: Between 2008 and 2021, China spent $240 billion bailing out 22 countries that are "almost exclusively" debtors in the Belt and Road Initiative, including Argentina, Pakistan, Kenya, and Turkey, according to a recent study published by researchers from the World Bank, Harvard Kennedy School, Kiel Institute for the World Economy, and AidData.

What You Missed: Looking to catch up on what you missed when Xi made his trip to Moscow? Listen to the last edition of Talking China In Eurasia, where guest Raffaello Pantucci explained what the meeting means for the world and what to watch moving forward.

One Thing To Watch

China may be ready to change its position on the islands known as the Southern Kuriles in Russia and the Northern Territories in Japan.

That report comes from the South China Morning Post, which cites an anonymous Chinese official as saying that Xi told Putin during their meeting in Moscow that China's stance was now neutral about the territorial dispute. Beijing's position has remained unchanged since 1964, when Chinese leader Mao Zedong said the disputed islands belonged to Japan.

It's an interesting development, if verified. There has been no official comment from any of the parties involved and Beijing has not issued a statement about any changes in how it views the territory.

That's all from me for now. Don't forget to send me any questions, comments, or tips that you might have.

Until next time,

Reid Standish

If you enjoyed this briefing and don't want to miss the next edition, subscribe here. It will be sent to your inbox every other Wednesday..

Years before Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin declared a "no-limits" partnership and the Kremlin launched a wide-ranging censorship campaign following its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Beijing and Moscow were sharing methods and tactics for monitoring dissent and controlling the Internet.

That growing cooperation between the two countries is shown in documents and recordings from closed door meetings in 2017 and 2019 between officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), its chief Internet regulator, and Roskomnadzor, the government agency charged with policing Russia's Internet, that were obtained by RFE/RL's Russian Investigative Unit (known as Systema) from a source who had access to the materials. DDoSecrets, a group that publishes leaked and hacked documents, provided software to search the files.

Beijing and Moscow have been deepening their ties for the past decade and controlling the flow of information online has been a focal point of that cooperation since Xi's first trip to Russia as leader in 2013. Over the ensuing years that cooperation expanded through a number of agreements and high-level meetings in China and Russia between top officials driven by a shared vision for a tightly controlled Internet.

The files give a behind-the-scenes look at some of those discussions -- the content of which has not been previously reported -- and offer a window into the practical level of cooperation under way between China and Russia when it comes to monitoring and restricting their respective Internets.

Among those deliberations -- which are cataloged through meeting notes, audio recordings, written exchanges, and e-mails that have been verified by RFE/RL -- Russian officials are seen asking for advice and practical know-how from their Chinese counterparts on a range of topics, including how to disrupt circumvention tools like VPNs and Tor. They are also seeking ways to crack encrypted Internet traffic as well as seeking tips from China's experience in regulating messaging platforms.

In turn, Chinese officials sought Russian expertise on regulating media and dealing with popular dissent.

In a 2019 exchange, officials from the CAC also made requests to Roskomnadzor to block a variety of China-related links to news articles and interviews that they had deemed to be "of a dangerous nature and harmful to the public interest."

In another instance in July 2017, Aleksandr Zharov, who served as the head of Roskomnadzor until 2020, asks a Chinese delegation led by Ren Xianling, then-deputy minister of the CAC, to help arrange a visit for Russian specialists to China, where they could study the operations of the Golden Shield Project -- the all-encompassing Internet censorship and surveillance system that helps make up what is colloquially known as China's Great Firewall.

The outcome of that visit is not outlined in the files RFE/RL received and Roskomnadzor and the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions about the contents of the material.

A Decisive Period

While not conclusive, that request highlights how Russia has sought to emulate China in exerting control over its people in the social-media age, says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian investigative journalist and co-author of the Red Web, a recent history of Moscow's attempts to control the Internet

"2017 was a crucial time that decided what direction to take Russia's Internet towards," Soldatov told RFE/RL. "It was this period when Russia was looking at how to build the more sophisticated system that it now has in place and it looks like the Russians learned something about how to do this from the Chinese."

For years, the Russian government has been putting in place the technological and legal infrastructure to smother freedom of speech online. Many of those measures have stumbled in practice, including a clumsy attempt to ban the Telegram messaging app in 2018, while other tools like VPNs and Tor also mostly eluded Russian censors.

But in 2019, those efforts reached a zenith when a controversial "sovereign Internet" law went into force that allowed Moscow to tighten control over the country's Internet by routing web traffic through state-controlled infrastructure and creating a national system of domain names.

While many of Russia's measures are still a far cry from those inside China, they have continued to be more technologically advanced and restrictive, a process that has accelerated since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.

Behind Closed Doors

The first closed-door meeting RFE/RL obtained records from is on July 4, 2017, in Moscow, where a Russian delegation led by Zharov met with a Chinese group led by Ren. Aleksandr Smirnov -- the head of the Kremlin's public relations department, which oversees information policy on behalf of the president -- invited Zharov to a Russian-Chinese media forum that took place in conjunction with an official visit by Xi.

In addition to attending the official part of the event, Smirnov told the Roskomnadzor chief in a letter to meet with CAC to "exchange experience in regulating the Internet sphere." The discussions, according to the letter, came about after a request from the Chinese.

According to documents and audio recordings examined by RFE/RL, the talks lasted more than two hours and involved Zharov with two deputies and one assistant, along with Ren and three CAC officials, plus translators for each side.

The discussions quickly turned to practical requests for expertise, with Zharov asking about Chinese "mechanisms for permitting and controlling" mass media, online media, and "individual bloggers," as well as Chinese experience regulating messenger apps, encryption services, and VPNs.

Zharov would go on to suggest that the CAC send a team of specialists to Russia to study the technical aspects of Russia's system for blocking content online, which he said took place with a "high efficiency" inside the country. The Roskomnadzor chief then requested that they be permitted to send a team to China to study the operations of China's vast Internet censorship and surveillance system, the so-called Great Firewall, because "more than 95 percent" of prohibited content in Russia is "foreign-produced."

The Chinese side asked for more details on the types of information blocked in Russia and how it monitors online discussions and processes personal data. Ren also asked for specifics and methods for Russia to use the Internet to "form a positive image" inside and outside the country. Zharov responded that image control was outside the purview of Roskomnadzor and that it should be raised with the Putin administration.

The Chinese delegation also asked about protests organized by opposition figure Aleksei Navalny a few months prior in March 2017 that coincided with the release of a documentary detailing alleged corruption by then-Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev and wanted to know what tools Roskomnadzor used to regulate media coverage of the nationwide rallies.

"These high-level exchanges have been going on for some time and they've always been focused on understanding what the other side is doing in one area, where they see the other falling short, and what they might learn from each other," Andrew Small, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund, told RFE/RL. "Internet censorship has been a big part of it because it relates to political stability at home and the shared view that outside forces are meddling from abroad."

Zharov said that protests in some cities took place with proper permits from the authorities, so information about them was not restricted online, and that a decision to let them take place was made because they were deemed relatively small-scale and enthusiasm for them would fade within "a few days." He added that the decision to let the protests take place was influenced by Putin's "very high level" of support from the public, which he said "fluctuates at around 89 percent."

The Roskomnadzor chief may have misrepresented popular support for Putin at the time and downplayed the level of sustained interest inside Russia for the Navalny documentary to his Chinese counterparts. According to polling by the state-owned Russian Public Opinion Research Center at the time, Putin's trust or confidence rating had fallen to 49.9 percent, with his approval rating sitting at some 81 percent. Also, according to a previous RFE/RL investigation, the Main Radio Frequency Center (GRFC) -- a specialized unit within Roskomnadzor -- tracked online interest and discussion about the Navalny documentary and their internal metrics show that it only began to decline on the Russian Internet by July -- nearly four months after it was released.

Few follow-up details are offered in the files obtained by RFE/RL about the requests and enquiries raised in the meeting, but Roskomnadzor compiled and shared a summary of the discussions with the FSB, Russia's main domestic intelligence agency. In that document, Zharov strikes a positive note and calls for expediting joint efforts with China to improve the blocking of information and the need for the "exchange of experience at the level of technical specialists" between the two countries.

Pushing Ahead With Deeper Ties

The 2017 meeting came after a wider push in the preceding years for deeper cooperation between Beijing and Moscow when it came to monitoring and controlling information online and saw new agreements on increased collaboration signed by Xi and Putin.

A breakthrough was reached in April 2016, when the Safe Internet League, a censorship lobbying group funded by Konstantin Malofeyev, a conservative Russian oligarch with close links to the Kremlin and Russian Orthodox Church, organized a conference in Moscow that featured a large Chinese delegation led by Lu Wei, who at the time was the head of the CAC, and Fang Binxing, the architect of the Great Firewall.

Denis Davydov, the executive director of the Safe Internet League, told The Guardian in 2016 that the deal to hold the conference was reached in December 2015 in Beijing between Fang and Igor Shchyogolev, a university friend of Putin's and former communications minister who serves as a Kremlin aide on Internet issues.

Malofeyev and the Safe Internet League were part of a group pushing for closer cooperation in order to learn from China how to better tame the web and limit Western digital influence. Shchyogolev also played a key role, and Soldatov says he was one of the main figures pushing for a pivot to China at a time when some elements of the intelligence services were still suspicious of involving the Chinese more closely in Russian domestic affairs.

Following the July 2017 meeting, officials from Roskomnadzor and the CAC continued to meet and share expertise.

By 2019, Russia had introduced its own "sovereign Internet law" and Putin began to accelerate moves to bring foreign technology companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to heel by imposing fines and introducing laws that required corporations to keep employees in Russia and thereby expose them to potential arrest.

During a June 2019 meeting in Moscow, Xi and Putin announced an upgrade in their ties to a "comprehensive strategic partnership," with cooperation on information and governing the Internet front and center. The two leaders said they shared a need for "peace and security in cyberspace on the basis of equal participation of all countries" and vowed to "promote the construction of a global order for the governance of information and cyberspace."

More Practical Cooperation

One month later, Zharov and a team from Roskomnadzor met with a Chinese delegation in Moscow led by Zhuang Rongwen, who was appointed to head the CAC in 2018.

According to readouts and recordings from the July 17, 2019, meeting, Roskomnadzor's representatives asked about Chinese expertise in being able to counteract attempts to bypass blocking, with Zharov citing the agency's failed attempts to block Telegram in 2018 as an example.

The Russian side also said it wanted to learn how China uses artificial intelligence to identify and block "prohibited content." A response from the Chinese delegation is not in the files, but a 2023 RFE/RL investigation revealed that Roskomnadzor has begun to use artificial neural networks to track Russians online, particularly searching for posts that insult Putin or call for protests.

SEE ALSO:

Inside The Obscure Russian Agency That Censors The Internet: An RFE/RL Investigation

On the sidelines of the World Internet Conference in Wuzhen, China, in October 2019, Roskomnadzor and the CAC signed a cooperation agreement on counteracting the spread of "forbidden information" and the obtained documents show select requests from the CAC in December 2019 to block information inside Russia under the guise of that deal.

Among those requests, which were laid out in three separate letters containing links to articles and sites, Chinese officials asked to censor a Chinese-language BBC story about China's "toilet revolution," a government campaign launched in 2015 to improve the country's sanitation; a blog post that discusses rumors of Xi suffering a back injury that received less than 4,000 pageviews; and links on GitHub, the software development website, that describe ways to bypass China's firewall inside the country.

Other requests include the homepage of The Epoch Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Falun Gong religious movement that is persecuted inside China, and links to profiles on the Russian social-media site VKontakte. In one instance, a user shared a video of an apparent ethnic Uyghur couple dancing that is titled "Rustam and Zumrad (Uighurs rock)." Beijing launched a sweeping crackdown and internment system against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang that the United Nations described as committing "serious human rights violations" and some Western countries have designated as genocide.

Another request features the VKontakte profile of a Chinese university student that contains a video interview of former Chinese President Jiang Zemin in 2000 with CBS's 60 Minutes that is archived on the nonprofit U.S. network C-SPAN. The interview touches on human rights issues, U.S.-China relations, and religious freedom in China.

"The scope of these requests is quite sweeping and it's interesting that it extends beyond Beijing's classic set of issues like Xinjiang, Taiwan, or Tibet," Small said.

RFE/RL does not know Roskomnadzor's response to the Chinese requests, but at the time of publication the links are still accessible inside Russia.

"It's a wide-ranging approach to image management and it's interesting that Beijing thinks they can make these broad requests from Russia," Small said. "It's an externalization of how these issues are handled inside China and perhaps a hint of where this cooperation is headed."