Aleksander Dugin, a Russian nationalist ideologue and strong supporter of President Vladimir Putin, has been bombarded with attacks on Chinese social media, where netizens criticized and mocked his Russian expansionist views that had once included the dismembering of China.
Two years after Putin launched an invasion of Ukraine, pro-Russia sentiment has been prevalent on Chinese internet.
But the backlash against Dugin has revealed a less mentioned side of what has so far appeared to be a cozy alliance between Beijing and Moscow -- hostility between Chinese nationalists and their Russian counterparts, the result of centuries of territorial disputes and political confrontations that Beijing has been reticent about displaying publicly in recent decades.
On May 6, Dugin opened an account on two of the most popular Chinese social media apps Weibo, China’s X, formerly known as Twitter, and Bilibili, a YouTube-like video site.
In the first video posted on both Weibo and Bilibili, Dugin greeted the Chinese audience and praised Beijing’s economic and political achievements in recent decades.
In the same video, he also criticized an article published in April in The Economist by Feng Yujun, director of Russian and Central Asian studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. Feng said in the article that Russia will inevitably lose the Ukraine war.
Dugin countered that Feng and some Chinese people underestimated Russia's "tenacity and perseverance."
The video was quickly condemned by Chinese citizens, who posted comments such as "Russia must lose," which received thousands of likes.
"This is an extremist who is extremely unfriendly to China and has made plans to dismember China," another message posted by a Weibo user named "Zhixingbenyiti" said.
Dugin, 62, was born in Moscow. In the 1980s, he became an anti-communist dissident.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he began to promote Russian expansionism. He believes that Moscow's territorial expansion in Eurasia will allow it to counter Western forces led by the United States.
In his 1997 book, Foundations of Geopolitics, Dugin wrote that dismembering China was a necessary step for Russia to become strong. People within Putin’s inner circle have reportedly shown interest in Dugin’s writing, which gave rise to his nickname "Putin’s brain."
However, Dugin's attitude toward China has changed significantly in recent years. In 2018, he visited China for the first time. In a speech at Fudan University, he praised China's economy, culture and leadership in the fight against colonialism.
He also changed his previous support for containing China and said in a speech that China and Russia could work together to "form a very important and non-negligible containment/pull effect" on Western powers.
Dugin is now a senior fellow at Fudan University's China Institute and one of the columnists for China's nationalist news organization, Guancha.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Dugin said in a column that the alliance between China and Russia would "mean the irreversible end of Western hegemony."
Philipp Ivanov, a China-Russia analyst and the founder of Geopolitical Risks + Strategy Practice, told VOA that "Dugin is an opportunist. As the Ukraine war dramatically accelerated the alignment between China and Russia, his position started to change, resulting in his current attempt to engage with China's intellectual and broader community."
Ivanov also thinks Dugin's influence on the Kremlin has been exaggerated.
Since joining Chinese social media, Dugin has gained more than 100,000 followers on Weibo and 25,000 followers on BiliBili. He has published fewer than five posts on Weibo, but nearly every one of them has more than 1,000 comments, most of which criticized him.
Under a post in which Dugin supported Putin on his fifth presidential term, people responded with comments such as "Russia is about to lose the war" and "The gates of hell are waiting for you."
Wang Xiaodong, China's most influential nationalist scholar, shared a Weibo post he made two years ago criticizing Dugin and Chinese pro-Russian groups.
"Introducing Dugin's ideas is not because I worry that the Kremlin will implement his ideas; He has the intention but not the strength! I just want to tell the Chinese people how some Russians, including elites in the powerful departments, view China. Do we Chinese need to risk our lives for them?" the post read.
Ivanov was not surprised by the attacks on Dugin on the Chinese internet.
"While Chinese netizens may support Putin's anti-Western/anti-US agenda, they are skeptical or outright negative about Russia's assault on an independent country's sovereignty and Russian expansionism, nationalism and chauvinism (which Dugin represents)," he told VOA in an email.
He said the history of China-Russia relations is predominantly about confrontation, competition and mistrust.
Among the attacks on Dugin, many netizens also brought up former Chinese territories that Russia occupied in the past 200 years.
"For the sake of ever-lasting friendship between China and Russia, please return Sakhalin and Vladivostok," one Weibo comment posted by "lovejxcecil" read.
Although China has not been involved in the war, the Russia-Ukraine war has been a hot topic on the Chinese internet.
According to Eric Liu, a former Weibo censor, Dugin's joining the platform undoubtedly brought more traffic to Weibo. However, it also means that Weibo needs to invest more resources in censorship to prevent him from making remarks that Beijing considers sensitive.
"He is a foreigner. He has no idea about China's 'political correctness’ or where the boundaries are," Liu said. "This risk will have to be taken care of by Weibo, which brought him in."
On Thursday, Dugin posted on Weibo that China and Russia could achieve "anything" together. His comment section has been turned off.
