Amid The Pandemic, The US and China Add Conspiracy Theories to Their Diplomatic Arsenals
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Alex Lin (SFS ‘23) is the editor of the Compass Futures section and a contributing writer to the Caravel's Crow’s Nest. The content and opinions of this piece are the writer’s and the writer’s alone. They do not reflect the opinions of the Caravel or its staff.
As U.S.-China relations continue to deteriorate amid the backdrop of the pandemic, increasingly audacious conspiracies about COVID-19’s origins have become a focal point of their geopolitical rivalry. Indeed, looking to unshoulder accountability for mishandling a public health crisis, power players in Washington and Beijing have decided to adopt and popularize hyperbolic narratives to gain the upper hand in a ferocious blame game.
For politicians and pundits in the States, COVID-19 is a bioweapon that would catapult the Chinese to global hegemony. For their Chinese counterparts, the virus’s sinister, covered-up origins in the U.S. must be intensely scrutinized.
Egged on by their leaders, netizens in both countries have rallied en masse behind COVID-19 conspiracies that train their fire at the opposite end of the Pacifc. The results are troubling. All of a sudden, flimsy facts stitched together with falsehoods are threatening to unseat peer-reviewed science as accepted narratives, and a war over facts is quickly converging with geopolitical confrontations in a post-truth world.
From QAnon to Congress: Trading Science for Conspiracies
On January 30, 2020, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) tweeted his speculations about the subtle links between the coronavirus and the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). After acknowledging the ambiguities of the virus’s origins, the senator went on to say, “Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.”
We still don’t know where coronavirus originated. Could have been a market, a farm, a food processing company.
— Tom Cotton (@SenTomCotton) January 30, 2020
I would note that Wuhan has China’s only biosafety level-four super laboratory that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/CtuU2czBLp
Over the course of the next month, Cotton let loose a slew of similar statements, which were polished up and turned into four “hypotheses” about the genealogy of the virus:
Although Cotton likely never meant to pioneer a disinformation campaign, his acknowledgment of unsubstantiated speculations may have lent credence to budding conspiracy theories, with agitators appropriating his tweets and substituting all the uncertainties with colorful details.
At around the same time, Francis Boyle, a so-called expert widely cited by fringe media, joined Alex Jones’s infamous InfoWars and touted his distorted interpretations of several scientific studies as “smoking gun” evidence for COVID-19’s manmade origins. He also bought into narratives propped up by Great Game India, which claimed that Chinese spies in a Canadian lab had smuggled the coronavirus to Wuhan and attempted to weaponize it. Although it is not clear whether Cotton and Boyle drew inspiration from one another, their rhetoric undoubtedly complemented each other nicely in the eyes of onlookers skeptical of mainstream narratives. Additionally, the Washington Times also pushed out two articles supporting the flimsy link between COVID-19 and alleged Chinese bioweapons research.
According to the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab), which conducted a network analysis of more than 400,000 tweets related to the Chinese bioweapon narrative, QAnon supporters, and “hyper-partisan right-wing influencers” were instrumental in building resonance for the notion of a manmade coronavirus.
However, according to the DFRLab, the winds shifted in April as the science supporting the natural origins of the virus became more unequivocal, and bioweapon narratives gradually made way for a more moderate lab leak theory. Indeed, on April 15, Fox News published an article touting the likelihood that the pandemic began with a safety breach at the WIV.
Five days later, former President Trump cashed in on the speculations and told reporters that he had “a high degree of confidence” in the possibility of a lab leak. At the same time, he accused the WHO of conspiring with the Chinese government to cover up the WIV’s grave blunder. On May 3, Secretary Pompeo also caved to the narrative, acknowledging that significant amounts of evidence apparently corroborated the laboratory origins of the coronavirus.
Although these mainstream media outlets and policymakers have left their rhetoric short of conclusive verdicts on a lab leak, they have no doubt invigorated—and legitimized—much more sensational narratives of sinister communist schemes and cover-ups aimed at taking down the free world.
It is important to note that WHO investigations, along with the wider consensus from the scientific community, do not preclude a possible leak from the WIV. But the virus’s genesis in nature remains a much more cogent explanation until further studies take a deeper dive. Nevertheless, pundits, policymakers, and fringe conspiracy theorists alike have not shied away from pushing flimsier explanations into the spotlight of public discourse, even while more authoritative voices are increasingly sidelined.
The Wolf Warriors Strike Back
2/2 CDC was caught on the spot. When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation! pic.twitter.com/vYNZRFPWo3
— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) March 12, 2020
Indignant at international scrutiny over its lack of transparency and its early mishandling of COVID-19, the Chinese government has lashed out with its own brand of bombastic narratives. Perhaps the most prominent practitioner of China’s conspiracy-driven “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” (a term inspired by the Chinese blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2 encompassing aggressive Chinese diplomacy) is Foreign Ministry Deputy Director Zhao Lijian, who harbored no scruples about sharing articles of questionable reliability that pinpointed the U.S. as the birthplace of the virus. “It might be U.S. army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan,” Zhao proclaimed. “Be transparent! Make public your data! U.S. owe us an explanation!”
US CDC admitted some #COVID19 patients were misdiagnosed as flu during 2019 flu season. 34 million infected & 20000 died. If #COVID19 began last September, & US has been lack of testing ability, how many would have been infected? US should find out when patient zero appeared.
— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) March 22, 2020
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’s (MFA) spokesperson, Hua Chunying, also threw her support behind Zhao’s controversial narrative. In late January, Hua parried the State Department’s scrutiny of the WIV by demanding that the U.S. “open the biological lab at Fort Detrick,” where the coronavirus is said to have originated, according to high-profile Chinese politicians and millions of the country’s hawkish netizens.
In fact, according to a ProPublica investigation, China has managed to build a formidable “propaganda machine” on Twitter by mass-distributing COVID-19 conspiracy narratives through an army of hacked accounts. Tracking more than 10,000 of these compromised users since August 2019, ProPublica journalists claim that many of these accounts link back to an interlocking network of agencies—including OneSight Technology, China News Service, and the United Front Work Department—all operating under the purview of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Domestically, the long arm of the Great Firewall (China’s formidable censorship apparatus) has clamped down on criticism of the CCP while leaving anti-American disinformation unscathed. As a result, a vibrant landscape of conspiracies and hyperbolic speculations has managed to thrive across China’s most popular social media platforms.
On Weibo (essentially Chinese Twitter), conspiracy theories targeting China are quickly and overwhelmingly debunked, but conspiracies targeting the US are rarely challenged and frequently left to proliferate (Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review).
Notably, a widely-circulated article on WeChat opened with the claim that “the novel coronavirus found in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market is certainly imported!” The piece then goes on to weave together a host of far-fetched connections to justify the American origins of the pandemic, claiming that U.S. troops brought the virus to Wuhan during the Seventh World Military Games, which were held near an early hotspot of concentrated outbreaks in the city. Moreover, the article walked readers through the slow proliferation of a “mysterious lung illness” linked to vaping throughout the U.S., which is supposedly the covered-up prelude to the Wuhan COVID-19 outbreak.
Timeline in a WeChat article outlining the evolution of a “mysterious lung illness” in the US supposedly linked to COVID-19 (WeChat)
On Zhihu, a popular Chinese Q&A platform, a user supplemented Hua Chunying’s demands to “open Fort Detrick” with a sensational storyline. Apparently, from 1943 to 1969, the CIA subjected 7000 U.S. soldiers to bioweapon experimentation, yet the lab mysteriously closed down in 2019. Then, as the U.S. soldiers arrived in Wuhan for the military games, they managed to plant the coronavirus, unleash a pandemic, and direct all the blame against China. “Ultimately, could COVID-19 be a plot targeting China?” the post wondered. “These scheming [Western] politicians are teaming up to relentlessly smear China because our forward strides have elicited their fears.”
A post on Zhihu titled “COVID-19 origins has been verified? The Foreign Ministry named this American laboratory multiple times. What dirty secrets are they hiding?” (Zhihu)
However, when a scientist emphasized the natural origins of the virus on the same platform while anchoring his arguments in an authoritative Nature publication, readers turned intensely skeptical. “Absolutely no persuasive potential,” chided one commenter, while another simply claimed that existing scientific evidence “still can’t prove the virus isn’t artificially engineered.” Yet another reader was even more succinct in their criticism. “American, British, Australian,” they said simply, insinuating that the predominantly Western authors of the Nature findings somehow harbored biases against China.
Indeed, like the U.S., China has embraced its fair share of exaggerated narratives in order to discredit its foremost geopolitical rival, and, in many ways, these baseless theories have successfully chipped away at the credibility of science. However, unlike U.S. politicians, who tip-toe around fringe media rhetoric, the formidable Chinese state apparatus has seemingly thrown its weight behind the web of revisionist narratives, turning its domestic cyberspace into a hotbed of anti-American conspiracies while exporting an infodemic of global proportions beyond its borders.
The Art of Conspiracy Wars
Conspiracy theories have conquered the social media landscape and anchored themselves firmly into popular consciousness as politicians and pundits weaponize their power. Why are these peripheral narratives suddenly running the show on the international stage? Perhaps conspiracies are policymakers’ shortcuts for pinning down a scapegoat during times of crisis. Perhaps sensational narratives deal easy blows to a rival power’s public image, making them an ideal addition to the government’s evolving geopolitical arsenal. Or perhaps people flock to conspiracies because they are reassured by the straightforward, storylike attributes of these imaginative hypotheses, and politicians are simply leveraging these stories to tranquilize the public and to divert dissatisfaction away from domestic woes.
Historical precedents may matter too. Americans have shown a knack for mixing xenophobia with sensational, racialized narratives, particularly when it comes to Chinese immigrants (although this is still clearly distinct from targeting the CCP). More prominently, the Chinese government has a history of layering charges of biowarfare against the US. In 1951 and 1952, the Chinese government, teaming up with their Soviet and North Korean allies, alleged that the American military deliberately spread a diverse array of infectious killers throughout Northeast China during the Korean War. These charges have been maintained until today.
Whatever motivates contemporary conspiracy theories, the risks of disinformation are clear. A great power competition centered around prestige, economic prowess, ideologies, and rule-making in global institutions has turned into a war over facts. As policymakers lock arms with unhinged theorists sporting tin-foil hats, public discourses on both sides of the Pacific have drifted further and further apart. Hawkish narratives are increasingly legitimized, and xenophobia has become mainstream. But what is the fallout from substituting science with sensation and dialogue with deep distrust?
Let’s hope we never find out.
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