Listening to an Authoritarian Neighbor: Russian Propaganda on Chinese Social Media After the Ukraine Invasion

Authoritarian states actively engage in cross-border propaganda. While the effects and the narratives of this propaganda targeting democracies have been studied in the past, little attention has been paid to how sudden and significant geopolitical events influence the engagement of authoritarian propaganda in other like-minded states. This study closes the gap by looking at Russia’s propaganda in Chinese social media platform Weibo. We look at how users of the platform reacted to messages spread by Russia Today (RT) and Sputnik after the full-scale invasion against Ukraine. Applying computational text analysis and regression analysis we show that although the outbreak of the war led to a surge in Russian propaganda—especially anti-Western and war-related narratives—Chinese audiences exhibited a pronounced tendency to engage primarily with narratives highlighting non-Western cooperation, reflecting a strong alignment with the Chinese government’s domestic propaganda.