The Chinese state’s big lie on COVID-19’s origins, and its use of external-facing online disinformation to promote that lie, seemed like a striking departure from precedent. But unlike Russia, the Chinese government believes it has the ability and even the mandate to turn its domestic online surveillance apparatus outward, to disrupt and, perhaps eventually, even control global narratives in real time. Within a matter of just a few years, Beijing has copied and successfully used many of Russia’s information warfare techniques. In the three years since Zhao’s tweet, Beijing has made Russian-style online disinformation campaigns a standard weapon of its foreign policy.Ĭhina is now playing an even more ambitious game. Later on in the pandemic, Chinese state media headlines cast doubt on the efficacy and safety of Western-made vaccines, as Chinese-made vaccines, on which Beijing’s soft power hopes were riding, failed to achieve comparable levels of efficacy. Chinese and Russian state–linked social media accounts increasingly quoted and tweeted one another, amplifying one another’s messages and demonstrating growing convergence between their ideologies and information strategies-a result, in part, of a secret agreement signed between Moscow and Beijing in July 2021 to cooperate on news coverage.Ĭoordinated inauthentic behavior on Twitter and Facebook also promoted alternative theories for where the virus might have originated or how it might have entered China. It prefaced the joining of wolf warrior diplomacy with brazen disinformation-“big lies” that, in recent years, had characterized Russian government officials but that more demure and camera-shy Chinese diplomats had avoided.Ĭhinese diplomats, government officials, Beijing-aligned content farms and social media accounts, and state media outlets soon began touting COVID-19 origin conspiracy theories, even when they contradicted one another. His words, which were retweeted more than four thousand times, marked the debut of China’s “big lie” on the novel coronavirus pandemic-that it did not begin in China-which swiftly became a sweeping global disinformation strategy. On March 12, 2020, Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian, the original “wolf warrior” diplomat, made this mainstream, tweeting in English, “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan.” Seeking to deflect blame for a global catastrophe that originated within its borders, Chinese officials and propaganda outlets began pushing a conspiracy theory that the U.S. The Chinese government debuted this playbook in a big way during the COVID-19 pandemic. Putin and his officials perfected a playbook of power projection that Beijing simply couldn’t resist. The Kremlin showed the world that the online information space is a realm perfectly fit for asymmetric warfare, in which one side does not have the ability to control the information flow and must find other ways to tilt narratives in its favor. presidential election, and its similar campaigns across Europe, seem to have changed Beijing’s calculus, however. Russia’s successful efforts to sow chaos and distrust amid the 2016 U.S. While the Chinese government projected stilted propaganda globally, its obsession with online information control more or less stopped at its own borders. 99īeijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World, Bethany Allen, HarperCollins (August 2023), $32.99Ĭommon wisdom once held that Beijing simply wasn’t in the business of disrupting information ecosystems abroad. Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World, Bethany Allen, HarperCollins (August 2023).
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