This archive report was first published on 25 August 2021.
China's disinformation campaign, which started last year, has gained momentum in recent weeks as the country faces growing scrutiny over its handling of the pandemic.
At the center of the campaign is the claim that the coronavirus may have first leaked from a research facility in Fort Detrick, Maryland. This theory has been promoted by officials, academics, and central propaganda outlets, as well as on social media.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin has repeatedly used official podiums to elevate unproven ideas about the lab leak theory, citing an outbreak of lung disease in Wisconsin in July 2019 as evidence. However, American health authorities have already connected this outbreak to vaping, not COVID-19.
Beijing has also accused the United States of being opaque on the issue of tracing the origins of the virus and falsely accusing China of using false propaganda. In a report released this month, several Chinese policy research institutes accused the United States of 'manipulating global public opinion by practicing 'origin tracing terrorism.'
One of the report's authors, Wang Wen, a professor at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of Renmin University, defended the report's allegations about the Fort Detrick lab, saying that unsubstantiated suggestions that the coronavirus was created in a laboratory were a form of terrorism because they caused 'unnecessary horror to society.'
China's efforts to emphasize American malfeasance have sometimes backfired. After Chinese state media quoted a Swiss biologist who warned that the W.H.O. effort to examine the origins of the pandemic would become a tool of the United States, the embassy of Switzerland in China said the expert appeared to be fictitious.
