Shared Interpretations, Divergent Agendas: The Information Dimension of China-Russia Alignment

Is the Sino-Russian partnership a cohesive authoritarian axis or a bounded alignment? Scholars have answered this question dimension by dimension, in the military, economic and diplomatic domains, yet the information dimension, arguably the arena in which declared alignment is least costly to enact and most visible to global audiences, has not been studied at scale. This paper supplies that missing dimension, and in doing so asks what actually diffuses between two authoritarian media centres in the digital era: the subjects they raise, the interpretations they project, or both. The design compares Russian state media on Telegram with Chinese state media on YouTube and TikTok across fifty-one months of the war in Ukraine (2022–2026), a corpus of forty-four Russian channels and thirty outward-facing Chinese sources spanning millions of items. Every broadcast is scored at two levels: the issue agenda, recording which aspects of the war a broadcaster raises, and the frame, recording how it interprets them. Because any single frame list would prejudge whose vocabulary defines convergence, the study derives two codebooks symmetrically, one from Russian presidential discourse and one from Chinese leadership discourse, and measures convergence on both. Scoring is performed by an ensemble of three large language models of Chinese, American and European provenance under a pre-specified, sealed pipeline, so that no detected pattern depends on a single model's training jurisdiction; the design offers a portable instrument for comparative research on authoritarian communication. The expectation stated before scoring followed the pattern found in other dimensions: convergence on the broad agenda but weaker convergence in interpretation. The evidence reverses it. On the Chinese-origin repertoire the two interpretive profiles are statistically indistinguishable from the no-difference reference, and on the Russian-origin repertoire they overlap closely, separated chiefly by frames carrying Russia's particular account of the war, which Chinese state media decline. The agendas however diverge substantially and have drifted further apart quarter by quarter: Russian media narrate a battlefield being won, Chinese media a diplomatic problem to be settled within a crisis of Western making. The platform removals of March 2022 sharpen the diffusion question, since Russian outlets are banned precisely where Chinese outlets remain, yet Russia's distinctive repertoire is not reproduced at scale through Chinese channels. For this panel, the findings specify what circulates through authoritarian networks and what does not. A shared interpretive vocabulary centred on Western culpability travels between the two centres; a common agenda does not, and neither does the partner's national repertoire where its own media are excluded. Authoritarian bloc-building in information space accordingly takes the form of echoed interpretation conducted in each state's own voice and on its own subjects, contesting the liberal order in parallel rather than in concert.