Beijing is pretending to play neutral on Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but the giveaway is how the Chinese Communist Party has the entirely state-controlled media echoing Russia’s propaganda.

The orders plainly went out — as a quickly deleted message on Horizon News, a social media account under Beijing News, accidentally revealed: “No posts unfavorable to Russia or with pro-Western content should be published.”

Last week, for example, while the rest of the world saw real images of besieged Ukrainian cities and the slaughter Russian forces have left in their wake — the 45-foot trench filled with civilian corpses in Bucha, and all the bodies littering the town — China’s People Daily shared a video on the social-media platform, Weibo, “showing” Russia giving humanitarian aid to Ukrainians outside of Kharkiv.

More than 3 million people watched that bull.

Right from the start, Chinese networks amplified Russian disinformation, quoting Russian officials’ false claims that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky had fled the capital and that Ukrainian soldiers surrendered on the invasion’s first day.

And China’s Phoenix TV has issued reports while embedded with Russian troops outside now-destroyed Mariupol of civilians supposedly welcoming the Russian forces.

Beijing has refused to condemn the invasion at all, instead asserting that the United States and NATO are at fault for Putin’s war. Xi Jinping even told President Joe Biden that the US and NATO are “the crux” of the problem.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s security service, the SBU, says China is to blame for a major pre-invasion cyberattack on Ukraine’s military and nuclear facilities, with thousands of hacking attempts on 600-plus Web sites belonging to the defense ministry in Kyiv and other institutions.

Maybe that was a favor to Russia for delaying the invasion until after the Beijing Olympics finished, as Xi reportedly requested.

After all, Putin and Xi declared their evil-best-friendship on Feb. 4, the opening day of the Olympics, announcing in 5,000-word joint statement, “Friendship between the two States has no limits, there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.”

For now at least, the invasion has awoken the West to Putin’s true nature. But the world still needs to admit that Xi is every bit as much an enemy of civilization.