In March of last year, journalists in Moscow captured a chilling interaction. Xi Jinping was wrapping up a trip to the Russian capital, where he had sat for meetings with Vladimir Putin. Stepping into his car, the Chinese leader said goodbye: “Right now there are changes, the likes of which we haven’t seen for one hundred years. And we are the ones driving these changes together,” he told Putin.

Chen Wenqing, Xi’s security chief and a former head of China’s ministry of state security espionage agency, is one of the officials driving those changes. He spent eight days—April 20-28—in Russia last month, according to China’s foreign ministry. There, Chinese state media reports say, he touted Xi Jinping’s vision for a “community with a shared future in cyberspace” at a three-day meeting of security officials from likeminded countries in St. Petersburg. He also met with Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s security council who is widely viewed as Putin’s closest adviser.

The so-called cyberspace community is a slogan derived from Xi’s vision for a “community of common destiny for mankind.” It’s a concept that promotes harmony between different countries, with the implied subtext that the party guides this community toward purportedly benevolent ends. In his St. Petersburg speech, Chen reportedly emphasized the “cyber sovereignty” of countries and said that they should all contribute equally to shaping “international cyberspace governance.” Chen also said: “China is willing to work with other countries to implement global security initiatives and build a fair and reasonable international order in cyberspace.” Obviously, in practice, this community would certainly take authoritarian repression in cyberspace global and probably sanction the use of state-backed breaches of the networks of the U.S. and its allies.

If the fact that Beijing wants more influence over how international bodies set policies for the internet is totally unsurprising, Chen’s effort to coordinate with such a large group of countries is noteworthy. The party’s catchphrases are being trotted out at international conferences and, presumably, are forming the basis for cooperation between China and aligned countries.

Russian authorities claim that 106 different countries were represented at the St. Petersburg gathering, called the International Conference of High Representatives for Security Affairs. Many are probably tin pot dictatorships; maybe only a few will meaningfully prioritize coordination with Beijing on this front. But all of them have a say at the U.N., which is working on a new cybercrime treaty.

One more thing: Public reporting on the rest of Chen’s itinerary is sparse, but the length of his trip obviously reflects the thriving security relationship between Beijing and Moscow. The partnership that Putin and Xi inked weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 is hardly without limits, even though “no-limits” is in the name. But the degree of coordination between Beijing and Moscow is evidently growing.

Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, said in senate testimony today that the intelligence community is seeing China and Russia exercising together over Taiwan scenarios “for the first time.” And there’s the matter of the Biden administration’s increasingly vocal demands that Beijing cease its support for Russia’s war effort, as well as new sanctions that the Treasury Department rolled out this week in accordance with those warnings. Chen leads the party’s central political and legal affairs commission. He was in Russia for just over a week. He wasn’t on vacation.