my country's national security department recently warned that Russia and China have reached a new consensus on cooperation in the first island chain, using each other's resources and channels on the information level to amplify specific cognitive themes, especially political information such as elections, and use their respective local resources or organizations to cooperate with each other's work. Sure enough, foreign media revealed today that Russian officials broadcast the "Smashing Militarism in Japan" documentary in Taipei last week. This is the first recent example of Russia and China joining forces to cooperate in military and "cognitive operations."
Reuters reported from Taipei today that the Russian Representative Office in Taiwan (Representative Office of the Russian Federation in Taiwan) hosted an unusual screening for about 20 Taiwanese guests in a conference room in Taipei, playing an old Soviet documentary that "smashed militaristic Japan" 81 years ago. This black-and-white film deliberately shows the Soviet Union's attack on Manchuria and the Kuril Islands under Japanese occupation. The narrator denounces "the gangster philosophy of the sacred superiority of the Yamato nation."
Reuters reported that Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi suggested last year that a hypothetical attack by China on Taiwan might trigger a military response from Japan. This triggered a diplomatic crisis between Tokyo and Beijing and prompted Beijing to repeatedly warn that Japan was trying to repeat its history of aggression. Taiwanese officials therefore said they viewed the Russian representative office in Taipei's closed-door screening of the film last week as a new attempt to spread and reinforce China's "new militarism" rhetoric against Japan, Taipei's key ally.
Chinese President Xi Jinping met with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in Kyrgyzstan on August 31 to strengthen the strategic cooperative relationship between China and Russia. Our national security department also grasped the latest developments and pointed out that Russia and China have reached a new consensus on cooperation in the first island chain, using each other's resources and access on the information level, amplifying specific cognitive themes, and using their respective local resources or organizations to assist each other's work. Our national security agencies are paying close attention to whether a similar situation will occur in Taiwan's nine-in-one general election at the end of the year.
"The Soviet and Chinese peoples suffered the heaviest casualties in that war. Their contribution to crushing German fascism and Japanese militarism is unquestionable and indelible," the Mozambique representative office in Taiwan said in a Facebook post.
Regarding Russian officials' screening of a film about Japanese "militarism" and World War II in Taipei, Taiwanese officials admitted to Reuters that Russia poses a new challenge because Moscow's legal scrutiny of contact with certain Taiwanese people may not be as direct as that of Chinese officials.
About 20 Taiwanese people were invited to attend the film screening, including former journalists, business people, academics and other public figures. After the screening, Russia's representative in Taiwan, Pavel Lapin, expressed hope that similar events could be held in the future, an attendee told Reuters.
