Russian President Vladimir Putin has a complicated and transactional relationship with the Chinese ‘President for Life’ Xi Jinping. The mutually beneficial equation between the neighbouring sovereigns is not absolute but qualified, both in substance and scope. The commonality of ‘taking on’ the United States of America cements the single wiring between the two authoritarian states, who otherwise remain circumspect about each other.

This often leads Russia to intervene tactically on behalf of the Chinese, like it did to bail out a cornered China from getting blamed for covering up the Covid related urgencies by the United States, as unnecessary ‘counter-productiveness’.

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However, Putin remains suspicious of Beijing’s growing footprint in its underbelly of former Soviet Republics, as also of the outreaches of Chinese sailing in the Arctic rim, where the Russians currently dominate. In the 21st century, authoritarian geopolitics of the cloak and dagger manner necessitate servile mouthpieces that posit ‘alternative truths’ of Beijing and Moscow, respectively.

Both nations have invested in sophisticated state-controlled propaganda, as a geopolitical tool. Russians have an elaborate news wire service called the TASS that disseminates the Kremlin view, much like the Chinese state-controlled mouthpieces like the Global Times ~ each propagating the statist position, sometimes to the discomfiture of each other, by exposing selective realities.

One recent cross-expose of the patent Chinese cover-up was the confirmation by TASS about the virtual free-style fight in the Galwan Valley in June 2020 where, ‘at least 20 Indian and 45 Chinese servicemen’ were said to have lost lives. While Indian authorities had conformed the valiant martyrdom of 20 of its bravehearts from the time of the incident, the Chinese had remained shockingly mum about their own loss.

The Indian authorities had consistently alluded to ‘significantly higher’ Chinese casualties in the said face-off, but the controlled and illiberal tendencies of the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) outrightly denied the same, initially – till the TASS embarrassingly blew the lid, officially. No sooner was the obvious stated by another foreign power, the Chinese sheepishly admitted to only four PLA fatalities, nine months after the actual incident.

Using most implausible and puerile logic, the Global Times said, “China decided to release the details at this moment to commemorate the martyrs instead of releasing the details immediately after the incident in June 2020, as it is demonstrating the resolution to safeguard the stability of bilateral ties and will not hype hatred or incite nationalism like Indian politicians and media”.

Such defensive rhetoric is a classic case of authoritarian spindoctoring and clumsy attempts at persuasion that impresses none, not even perhaps within China ~ however, weaving the emotion of nationalistic pride and resilience is straight out of the Xi Jingping playbook for the media which aims to create, ‘a sound environment for public opinion’, even if it means lying about its own lives lost.

The single-party reality since founding father Chairman Mao’s seminal defence of propaganda ~ ‘literature and art fit well into the whole revolutionary machine as a component part…  They operate as powerful weapons for uniting and educating the people and for attacking and destroying the enemy’ ~ is omnipresent to unconvincingly justify all state irrationalities.

An almost comical invocation of the ostensible ‘battlefield diary’ of one of its killed soldiers, Xiao Siyuan, is supposed to read for public consumption: “We are the boundary stone of the motherland, and every inch of land under our feet is the territory of the motherland”.

Unsurprisingly, China ranks a shocking 177th out of 180 countries in the 2020 World Press Freedom Index as per Reporters Without Borders (RSF). This slide in mediamanagement has been accelerated in recent times with China earning the dubious distinction of the world’s biggest jailer of journalists, where much beyond censorship, surveillance, intimidation and harassment of anyone sharing the truth is sure invitation to trouble.

In 2019, RSF had released a damning investigative report titled, ‘China’s pursuit of a New World Media Order’, which graphically detailed the tactics of brazen propaganda and complete intolerance to contrarian/ independent views. Most recently, the Chinese media regulator decided to ban BBC World News, presumably as reprisals for the BBC’s independent reporting that did not conform to the official Chinese ‘versions’ of events and happenings.

Similarly, Putin’s autocratic Russia is no better and notwithstanding the specific release of information on the Chinese fatalities in Galwan, it is important to remember that Russia did not really choose India over China, during that tense summer of Indo-Sino discontent. The fact that both Russia and China are also mutually interdependent and highly leveraged with each other, commercially and diplomatically, ensures that they afford each other the larger benefit of narrative, save an occasional slipping of an odd curve ball, like this one.

Autocratic regimes have unique sensitivities, urgencies and priorities that can confound democracies about the selectivity, falsehood or sheer chicanery in perception management via  elaborate propaganda machines. The slip between the cup and lip is significant, as speaking at Davos, Xi Jinping, urged the world to, “abandon ideological prejudice, and jointly follow a path of peaceful coexistence, mutual benefit and (using a phrase with which he is identified) win-win cooperation.’

This from a nation mired with territorial issues in Hongkong, Taiwan, Tibet, Japan, South China Seas, India etc., was spellbinding in its sheer temerity of double standards. However, Xi Jinping’s belligerence, manipulation and machinations have got increasingly noticed, and once-‘friendly’ nations are now facing the consequences of ‘debt-traps’, coercion and ‘adjustments’ to their sovereign pride and independence.

The post-Covid world and the proven expansionism of the Chinese juggernaut is even giving vassal states like Pakistan sleepless nights with the CPEC (Chine Pakistan Economic Corridor) getting whispered about as yet another ‘East India Company’ in the making. Importantly for India and its resident emotions, it must shun a hyperbolic counterreaction to anything coming out of China as ‘news’, as the same has been repeatedly proven to be false and manipulated propaganda.

Any state that can lie about the death of its soldiers to defend its political regime is on very thin ice, as it may deflect and ‘manage’ local opinions temporarily, but is doomed to implode under the weight of its own make-believe propaganda, eventually.

(The writer is Lt Gen PVSM, AVSM (Retd) and former Lt Governor of Andaman & Nicobar Islands and Puducherry)