Zak Doffman
In the world of authoritarian regimes, an alarming game of “keeping up with the Joneses,” or more accurately the Xis, is playing out as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin looks on with envy at China’s technological lockdown. Putin has described the standoff between China, Russia and the U.S. as a technological war—one that has inspired additional domestic controls as the tech world polarises. Changes have been made to the online infrastructure, and now we’re seeing proposals to restrict the content and applications running across the top. If there is a template Putin wants to follow for Russia’s digital future, it isn't difficult to figure out where it is coming from.
November started with Russia’s Sovereign Internet Law mandating state surveillance hardware to be installed inside the country’s internet access points. Within a week, Putin had proposed replacing Wikipedia with a “more reliable” Russian version. At the same time, his parliament shaped a bill to force computers and smart devices to preinstall Russian tech. Both proposals were criticised for further restricting the online freedoms of Russia’s 150 million citizens. Wikipedia is already banned in China—as are services and applications from Western tech giants. You can join the dots.
In June, Putin met China's President Xi Jinping at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum to cement the strengthening “strategic relationship” between the two countries that represent the greatest threat to the U.S. and its allies. The leaders signed a joint statement announcing that “the China-Russian relationship has entered a new era, and is facing new opportunities for greater development.” According to China’s state media, “the objective of such a new kind of partnership is for both sides to give more support to each other as they seek to take their own development paths, preserve respective core interests, and protect sovereignty and territorial integrity.”
Putin used the event to take aim at Washington’s clampdown on China’s tech giants, specifically Huawei, but it could as easily have been Hikvision or Dahua, SenseTime, Yitu or Megvii. He said of Trump’s campaign against Huawei that “in some circles, it is even called the first technological war of the coming digital era.” And it was clear where Russia was positioned in that technological war. Huawei and other giants such as Tencent and Alibaba are investing heavily in the country. Huawei is the leading smartphone supplier to the country, with almost the same market share as in China, and the company is helping to deploy new 5G networks.
Putin’s technological war reference clearly has a much wider context than consumer tech. While we can debate Huawei’s alleged links to Chinese military and intelligence agencies, there is no debate over state sponsored threat actors in China and Russia attacking U.S. government and commercial targets. There is no debate over Russia’s election interference. And wherever there is a global hotspot—the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Korea, the South China Sea, the U.S. and one of China or Russia or both will be somewhere in the mix.
It is these standoffs, this multi-dimensional warfare, that provides the real context to Putin’s technological war. The integration of physical and cyber conflict has created an open season for cyber attacks on government and commercial targets, for supporting proxies and rogue states, for abuses of social media platforms and their extraordinary reach into every home and workplace in the West. The U.S. and key allies, notably the U.K. have now had to change tactics and structures to deal with this.
But Putin’s rhetoric also resonated closer to home, leading to accusations of suppression, of clamping down on dissent. The president claims that the replacement of Wikipedia with a Russian alternative will help to preserve Russia’s culture against a “war on the Russian language.” The president told a meeting of the Russian Language Council that “it’s better to replace it with the Big Russian new encyclopaedia in electronic form—reliable information, in a good modern form.” In other words, why let the truth get in the way of a good story.
Meanwhile, the Duma’s proposed bill to mandate the preinstallation of Russian software on devices sold in the country is intended to “provide domestic companies with legal mechanisms to promote their programs for Russian users.” Although both these additional proposals have been presented as fending off threats to Russia’s way of life, both also push back on U.S. dominance over global technology standards. And both enhance the Kremlin’s levers of control over the internet.
The relationship between China and Russia has ebbed and flowed over the years, but on the basis of “my enemy’s enemy” there is a natural closeness. Economically, the two countries offer some level of hedge against sanctions and tariffs. Energy-wise, China consumes and Russia produces. On the security front, the U.S. and its allies cannot afford for the security and defense engagement between Russia and China to go too far. An understanding, some joint exercises, war games, all manageable. A fully fledged set of alliances in either the physical or cyber domains is very undesirable.
On the technology front, the coming months will either see the U.S. cycle back on the restrictions on China’s champions to recover its international dominance, or the split will become more fixed, forcing those tech giants, led by Huawei, to replace some key U.S. solutions. In Russia, the Chinese giants have a large and influential market to leverage. And a byproduct of this will be Putin taking advantage of China’s template for mass surveillance and control, for technical suppression. Step by step, the threat of an Iron Cyber Curtain to match the Great Firewall will become more real.
The “strategic partnership” between Russia and China should not be overplayed—it remains more tactical than anything else, and the U.S. and its allies will hope it stays that way. For Russia’s internet users, though, the danger is that a Chinese template for Russia’s digital future has already taken root. Putin has seen what he wants. The question now is how can he practically and politically execute on that.
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