Coronavirus Conspiracy Claims: For China, the ‘USA Virus’ Is a Geopolitical Ploy

As scientists continue to study how the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in Wuhan, China, and around the world, the infection’s early pathways have proven fertile ground for speculation and conspiracy theories. Although COVID-19’s earliest origins may remain uncertain, the story of one volley in the ongoing U.S.-China blame game shows that misinformation about the disease can be traced to specific speculations, distortions, and amplifications. A hostile messaging war between U.S. and Chinese officials seeking to deflect blame for the pandemic’s harms has included the U.S. president labeling the pandemic a “Chinese virus” to a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson spreading unfounded speculation that the U.S. military had a hand in introducing the virus to Wuhan.

 That speculation fed off of widely debunked theories that the virus was human-engineered and the fact that U.S. military personnel took part in the Military World Games in Wuhan in October 2019. On March 12, Zhao Lijian, a deputy director-general of the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s Information Department, took to Twitter with a video clip in which U.S. Centers for Disease Control chief Robert Redfield said some patients who died from COVID-19 might not have been tested. Zhao added: “It might be US army [sic] who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” the coronavirus that became a global pandemic first surfaced late last year in Wuhan, China.

 But according to one common narrative making its way around Chinese messaging apps, an American soldier was patient zero. “Chinese netizens and experts” are urging the United States to release health information about a U.S. delegate who attended the Military World Games in Wuhan, asserted a February 22 story from Global Times. \The publication, an offshoot of the Chinese Communist Party organ People’s Daily, insinuated that a U.S. military cyclist might have brought the disease from Fort Detrick in Maryland. Chatter about American origins of the disease had begun a month earlier, in the wilds of China’s chat services and on tiny YouTube channels.

 That alone wouldn’t have amounted to much; conspiracies are as common on social media as ants at a picnic, and the small accounts speculating about “bioweapons” and “the USA virus” got little early traction. But this time, Chinese state media picked up the story from internet chatter and turned it into an international phenomenon involving not only official media channels but influential diplomats as well. State channels with massive Facebook followings backed away from prior acknowledgments that the virus had originated in Wuhan, recasting the idea as merely a theory—just one of many unknowns. Zhao Lijian, the spokesman and deputy director general of the Information Department of China’s Foreign Ministry, speculated to his half-million followers on Twitter that the United States was secretly concealing early 2020 COVID-19 deaths in annual flu counts. In an unusually overt act of tinfoil-hat diplomacy, he shared an article from the notorious anti-American crackpot site GlobalResearch. 

The headline reads, “COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the U.S.” Zhao’s implication that the United States and its military could be behind Wuhan’s outbreak, even inadvertently, sparked outrage. The U.S. government summoned Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, over the remarks. Cui later publicly disavowed the U.S. military conspiracy theory, and Chinese officials have not further amplified it. Groundless speculation about the origins of the pandemic did not begin with Zhao, but the case of his eye-catching tweets reveals how China’s changing propaganda tactics have interacted with mangled news reporting, social media conspiracy theorizing, and underlying U.S.-China tensions—all resulting in high-profile misinformation about a public health crisis.