Moscow and Beijing are driving closer collaboration between authoritarian states and such networks help advance repression globally, according to researchers who used artificial intelligence to drill into the activities.?
The U.S.-based nonprofit Action for Democracy said in a report Wednesday that its researchers built an index to track seven types of cooperation, including on funding, diplomatic activities, propaganda and tech sharing.
It found that China and Russia ¡°sit at the center of global authoritarian collaboration¡± and were jointly involved in around half of all recorded activity. The report¡¯s authors said that such cooperation generated compound returns because, for example, ¡°surveillance infrastructure exported to one regime becomes a template for the next.¡±
¡°Left untracked, these dynamics risk producing a world in which repression scales across borders while democratic responses remain fragmented and reactive,¡± the nonprofit said.
The collaboration appears to be a rarely noticed but significant byproduct of closer ties that Moscow and Beijing have built since Vladimir Putin¡¯s full invasion of Ukraine in early 2022. It also comes as Chinese leader Xi Jinping ratchets up military pressure on democratic Taiwan, with a view to taking control of the island of 23 million people eventually.
The closer cooperation coincides with what many observers see as President Donald Trump eroding democratic norms in the U.S., notably by casting doubt on the results of elections.
Trump has also largely abandoned efforts by his predecessor, Joe Biden, to foster democracy around the world with events like a summit in 2021 that was joined by representatives from some 110 nations. A Chinese official labeled that event a ¡°joke.¡±
Action for Democracy warned that autocratic governments were ¡°consciously scaling and expanding the depth of their collaborations¡± through tools like forums and shared media networks.
These activities enabled the countries to ¡°standardize narratives, cultivate relationships, and provide recurring venues for exchanging operational practices and personnel.¡±
The report is based on an online dataset of more than 72,000 collaborations between nations gleaned from around 400 million sources in more than 100 languages.?
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