Facing the Authoritarian Challenge: The Sino-Russian Alignment and What Canada Should Do About It

Balkan Devlen's March 2021 policy paper analyses the structural drivers and operational dimensions of the Russia-China strategic alignment, with particular attention to coordinated disinformation campaigns as a shared tool of democratic subversion. The paper documents how China was increasingly learning from and adapting Russia's information warfare tactics in the post-COVID period — absorbing lessons from Russian operations and applying them with Chinese operational scale and resource depth.

The alignment framing is the paper's most important analytical contribution. Most counter-FIMI analysis treats Russian and Chinese information operations as separate threat tracks; Devlen demonstrates that they are increasingly coordinated, with shared objectives of democratic destabilisation and a division of labour that plays to each state's relative strengths. The paper's examination of joint influence operations, digital authoritarianism export, and the coordination of disinformation with economic and security pressure provides a framework for understanding the two-actor authoritarian challenge that remains analytically relevant. For practitioners working on either Russian or Chinese FIMI who have not considered the coordination dimension, this paper is important reading.