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Podcast: Inside The Investigation That Shows China And Russia's Growing Cooperation On Censorship


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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.

On the latest episode of Talking China In Eurasia, Andrei Soshnikov, who heads RFE/RL’s Russian investigative unit, joins host Reid Standish to break down their recent investigation based on leaked documents from closed-door meetings between Chinese and Russian officials where they trade tactics and expertise to censor the Internet and monitor dissent.

The investigation, originally published in April, is based on a trove of documents and recordings from meetings in 2017 and 2019 between officials from the Cyberspace Administration of China, its chief Internet regulator, and Roskomnadzor, the government agency charged with policing Russia's Internet.

Listen to the full episode here:

Inside The Investigation That Shows China And Russia’s Growing Cooperation On Censorship
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    Reid Standish

    Reid Standish is an RFE/RL correspondent in Prague and author of the China In Eurasia briefing. He focuses on Chinese foreign policy in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and has reported extensively about China's Belt and Road Initiative and Beijing’s internment camps in Xinjiang. Prior to joining RFE/RL, Reid was an editor at Foreign Policy magazine and its Moscow correspondent. He has also written for The Atlantic and The Washington Post.

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    Katie Toth

    Katie Toth is an audio producer and journalist researching the impact of border security on human rights. Her work has been featured on NPR and the CBC and in Foreign Policy and Vice.

About The Newsletter

In recent years, it has become impossible to tell the biggest stories shaping Eurasia without considering China’s resurgent influence in local business, politics, security, and culture.

Subscribe to this weekly dispatch in which correspondent Reid Standish builds on the local reporting from RFE/RL’s journalists across Eurasia to give you unique insights into Beijing’s ambitions and challenges.

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