I recently met with a Ukrainian independent media worker and talked about the information warfare reality they’ve observed on the front line.
He used a very precise distinction: Russia hack, China fake.
Everyone knows Russia’s hacking capability is genuinely strong — but exactly how strong?
Google’s Mandiant published a comprehensive report in 2024 on Sandworm, the hacking unit of Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU) (note 1), documenting in detail how they breached Ukraine’s power grid, crippled water infrastructure, and deployed destructive malware.
Breaching systems, crippling infrastructure, stealing intelligence — these attack operations were already routine for them, and even more so after the war began.
But when it comes to using AI to mass-produce deepfake content at scale and manipulate public opinion on social media, the resources China has invested and the experience it has accumulated far exceed Russia’s.
Microsoft’s 2024 Digital Defense Report (note 2) compared China’s and Russia’s methods within the same document: both countries’ AI image and audio/video capabilities were rated “high,” but with different preferences — China makes heavy use of AI-generated images (such as the AI cartoons of “Taizi Flood”), while Russia leans toward AI voice cloning (such as fake documentaries narrated by an impersonated Elon Musk).
The Jamestown Foundation’s analysis is even more direct — the report is literally titled “Deepfakes with Chinese Characteristics” (note 3), documenting how China is preparing to weaponize deepfake technology for use in fabricating news anchors and interfering in elections.
The two sides certainly aren’t entirely separate.
China also runs operations like Volt Typhoon, pre-positioned inside U.S. infrastructure, and Russia has its own disinformation tradition dating back to the Soviet era.
But the relative specializations are very clear: Russia is strong at breaking into systems, China is strong at manufacturing and manipulating content.
China’s investment in AI isn’t just about external cognitive warfare.
It has poured massive resources into using AI for internal surveillance and governance.
Facial recognition, public opinion monitoring, social control — this entire system has been running and evolving for years.
A late-2025 report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) (note 4) documented how China uses large language models for automated censorship, public security stability maintenance, smart courts, and smart prisons.
Carnegie’s research has been tracking this since 2019 (note 5), when Huawei alone had already exported AI surveillance technology to at least 50 countries.
By 2026 (note 6), AI censorship tools on platforms like WeChat and Douyin could already scan massive volumes of text, images, and video in real time.
On the question of “how to use AI to control the information environment,” China has the most mature real-world experience in the world.
Ukraine is facing the same thing.
The German Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) published an analysis this year by Ukrainian think-tank researcher Yurii Poita (note 7), who personally scraped 1,800 posts from high-attention Weibo accounts and broke down four recurring pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine narrative patterns.
What they’re up against isn’t just Russian missiles and hackers, but increasingly sophisticated disinformation and deepfake content built on Chinese technical foundations.
Taiwan has long stood on the front line of Chinese information operations, while Ukraine fights Russian hackers and disinformation on the battlefield every single day.
These two sets of experience are, in fact, highly complementary.
Taiwan understands how China does content manipulation; Ukraine understands how Russia wages system warfare.
Maybe it’s a stretch to say we truly “understand” it, but at least we genuinely face it every day.
Many netizens are also actively sharing how to spot it and organizing together to report it.
We should be exchanging more actively with Ukraine — not just sharing, but learning together how to face the challenges of this new era.
What really deserves our attention is what comes next.
Technical exchange between China and Russia is already happening.
A 2025 report from the European External Action Service (EEAS) (note 8) tracked foreign information manipulation activity involving at least 25 platforms and 38,000 accounts, with Russia as the primary actor and China second.
A 2025 study from the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) (note 9) used the term “convergence” directly to describe the trend of Sino-Russian cooperation on information manipulation.
Concrete cases are already surfacing: in early 2025, Putin publicly directed the Russian government and Sberbank to cooperate with China on AI development (note 10), and even earlier, China’s Dahua Technology had already partnered with Russia’s NtechLab to develop facial recognition cameras (note 11).
For now, cooperation between China and Russia still looks more like “strategic parallelism” and “narrative convergence” — Microsoft’s report notes there’s no evidence yet that the two countries are directly sharing resources or using the same criminal networks (note 2).
But the trend is clear:
if China further hands over its AI content generation and public opinion manipulation techniques to Russia — a country that already has top-tier hacking capability able to break into almost any system — adding China’s level of AI manipulation technology on top would create a combination that would be extremely difficult to counter.
One side can get into your systems. The other can rewrite what you see.
This is exactly why Taiwan and Ukraine need more substantive exchange.
We face different threats, but the sources of those threats are starting to converge.
Waiting until the convergence is complete before starting to prepare would already be too late.
(Note 1): Mandiant, “APT44: Unearthing Sandworm,” 2024. https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/apt44-unearthing-sandworm
(Note 2): Microsoft, “Digital Defense Report 2024,” 2024. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/security/security-insider/threat-landscape/microsoft-digital-defense-report-2024
(Note 3): Jamestown Foundation, “Deepfakes with Chinese Characteristics,” China Brief Vol. 24 Issue 7, 2024. https://jamestown.org/deepfakes-with-chinese-characteristics-prc-influence-operations-in-2024/
(Note 4): ASPI, “The Party’s AI: How China’s New AI Systems Are Reshaping Human Rights,” 2025. https://www.aspi.org.au/report/the-partys-ai-how-chinas-new-ai-systems-are-reshaping-human-rights/
(Note 5): Carnegie Endowment, “The Global Expansion of AI Surveillance,” 2019. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2019/09/the-global-expansion-of-ai-surveillance
(Note 6): Carnegie Endowment, “China’s AI-Empowered Censorship: Strengths and Limitations,” 2026. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2026/03/chinas-ai-empowered-censorship-strengths-and-limitations
(Note 7): Yurii Poita (MERICS), “Russian propaganda abounds in Chinese social media debate on Ukraine,” 2026. https://merics.org/en/comment/russian-propaganda-abounds-chinese-social-media-debate-ukraine
(Note 8): EEAS, “3rd Report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference Threats,” 2025. https://www.eeas.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/2025/EEAS-3nd-ThreatReport-March-2025-05-Digital-HD.pdf
(Note 9): CEPA, “Sino-Russian Convergence in Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference,” 2025. https://cepa.org/comprehensive-reports/sino-russian-convergence-in-foreign-information-manipulation-and-interference/
(Note 10): Reuters, “Putin orders government to work with Sberbank on AI development with China,” 2025. https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/putin-orders-russian-govt-work-with-sberbank-ai-development-2025-01-17/
(Note 11): ASPI / public records, Dahua Technology’s partnership with Russia’s NtechLab to develop wearable facial recognition devices, 2019.