A disinformation campaign by the Chinese Communist Party is hard at work to distract the international community from Beijing’s failures in containing the COVID-19 outbreak, according to experts.
The U.S. intelligence community assessed that Chinese agents helped promote the false claims of impending martial law, which went viral in March across multiple social media platforms and that were even texted to people’s cell phones, according to a report from the New York Times citing U.S. officials from six spy agencies. The deceptive messages claimed they were based on inside information from a friend or family inside the U.S. government, and spread rapidly across Twitter, Facebook, 4chan, and elsewhere.
The National Security Council sent out a tweet late one night in mid-March denying rumors swirling on social media that the federal government was about to impose a nationwide quarantine during the COVID-19 outbreak, bluntly calling the text messages going around “FAKE.” The State Department also sounded the alarm that China, Russia, and Iran are reinforcing each other’s disinformation efforts by sharing similar messages, according to a nonpublic Global Engagement Center report reviewed by Politico.
Daniel Hoffman, the CIA’s former station chief in Moscow, told the Washington Examiner that he sees similarities between what the Chinese Communist Party is doing and what the Russians have done for a long time.
“I don’t know if they’re learning from Russia — I know they certainly share plenty with Russia. I’m sure they’re sharing tactically quite a bit … Their similarity with Russia and, frankly, the Soviet Union, is they need to conceal the truth from their people. That’s the bottom line, and that’s what the Soviets did too,” Hoffman said. “We are collateral damage in all of that, but they are messaging to their people first and foremost because they don’t want their people to know just how horrifically badly they handled incident response for this pandemic. And then, secondly, they’ve got designs on exploiting the rest of the world, so their reputation is at stake, so they’re going to try to whitewash their reputation.”
The report from the New York Times said U.S. officials do not believe Chinese operatives generated the fake lockdown messages but instead helped spread messages that already existed. The officials claimed the Chinese agents borrowed tactics from Kremlin-linked troll farms and social media disinformation campaigns. The use of encrypted messaging apps by the Chinese operatives helped conceal the true extent of their involvement, but the report said the United States is investigating whether Chinese spies in U.S. embassies and diplomatic outposts played a role in pushing the falsehoods. The article said in the U.S. the Chinese effort aimed to sow political discord, while in Europe, other messaging by Chinese agents attempted to highlight alleged disunity among Western countries. All this while China pushed its so-called donation diplomacy, sharing personal protective equipment and testing technology, much of which has been found to be faulty.
There is well-documented evidence that China tried to cover up the spread of the coronavirus, muzzled whistleblowers, intimidated doctors, misled the World Health Organization, and blocked outside health experts. At least one study indicated that if the Chinese government had acted more quickly, the coronavirus’s global spread would have been greatly reduced.
The U.S. intelligence community reportedly believes the Chinese Communist Party downplayed the severity of the initial coronavirus outbreak and continues to mislead about the infection rate and death toll inside China.
“Their goal is two-fold. First, to control and repress their own population. And secondly, it’s to whitewash China’s reputation overseas so that they can do their debt-trap diplomacy, exploit African countries and Europe, and gain fellow travelers all over the world, including here in the United States,” Hoffman said. “I’ve called the coronavirus ‘Xi Jinping’s Chernobyl.’ The Soviet people for sure knew the government was out to screw them, but then they realized that people were getting killed because of this form of government, this obsequious bureaucracy that doesn’t respond the way it should to a crisis. That’s what you’ve got in China, and now their people know it.”
The report from the State Department’s counter-propaganda center also spotlighted the efforts by the Chinese government, along with the regimes in Russia and Iran, to deflect blame. The piece by Politico said the three countries have used their state-run media to converge their messaging, pushing similar narratives, including those that claim the coronavirus is a U.S.-originated biological weapon.
“What we saw as the health crisis started to come under control in China is that the CCP really started pushing a concerted effort to try to reshape that narrative,” Global Engagement Center Director Lea Gabrielle said. “So in a short period of time, the CCP went from letting Russian disinformation claiming the U.S. was the source of the virus proliferate in Chinese social media, to raising questions on state media about the origin’s source, to promoting disinformation that the U.S. was the source of the virus.”
Gordon Chang, the author of The Coming Collapse of China, told the Washington Examiner that “Xi Jinping and the Communist Party maintain that the United States is in terminable decline and that China should take a bigger role on the global stage.” He added that China’s leader “saw this as a chance to realize his ambitions — not just to cover up, but to take over.”
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo pointed out other ways that China “is exploiting the world’s focus on the COVID-19 crisis by continuing its provocative behavior” during a Thursday press conference, including cracking down on pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and acting more aggressively toward Taiwan.
“We have always said that China has an obligation to live up to its promises, its obligations — so I was speaking about the virus earlier — to live up to the rules that it put in place and that it signed off on. We’d ask them to continue to do that here,” Pompeo said, adding, “The United States strongly opposes China’s bullying, and we hope other notes hold them to account too.”
According to Fox News, the U.S. intelligence community is carrying out a full-scale investigation into the theory that the novel coronavirus outbreak first detected in China in late 2019 may have originated in a Wuhan government lab through an accidental escape or inadvertent infection, rather than originating in a wet market as is widely believed.
An intelligence community official told the Washington Examiner this week, “We are actively and vigorously tracking down every piece of information we get on this topic, and we are writing frequently to update policymakers.” The official also noted, “the IC has not collectively agreed on any one theory.”
