Coronavirus mutates to a US import as Xi tries to shift blame

Beijing propagandists are already rewriting the outbreak’s history, while portraying its campaign against the virus as a great win for Xi Jinping.

Chinese President Xi Jinping wears a mask as he talks about the coronavirus. Picture: AFP

When Beijing appointed a feisty diplomat known for his social media tirades as foreign ministry spokesman, it was clear the regime wanted to pack more punch into its propaganda.

Zhao Lijian duly delivered last week, spearheading Beijing’s mission to portray its campaign against coronavirus as a great victory for Xi Jinping’s communist regime and casting doubt about whether China was even the outbreak’s source.

In a headline-grabbing moment, Zhao suggested the virus might have been brought to Wuhan, the original centre of the pandemic, by the US military.

His comments reflected outlandish conspiracy theories that have been allowed to flourish on the Chinese internet by the same censors who have busily deleted any references to Wuhan cover-ups and whistleblowers.

According to one claim, the virus might have been carried to Wuhan last year by American competitors at the Military World Games.

But even away from wild internet conspiracies, Chinese state media and embassies are spinning a new narrative about the disease, as infection rates have surged in Europe and America while falling sharply in China.

They claim the “heroism” of the Communist Party in battling the virus under Xi’s leadership bought the world time to deal with the crisis.

They ignore China’s cover-ups, the desperate scenes at its overwhelmed hospitals, the bravery of its medics and the revelations of its journalists about the s crisis.

Although Twitter is blocked in China, its diplomats around the world have been deployed to use it to dispute that the virus even originated on Chinese soil.

This article is very much important to each and every one of us. Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US. https://t.co/LPanIo40MR

— Lijian Zhao 赵立坚 (@zlj517) March 13, 2020

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

They insisted the source was unknown despite the overwhelming data and earlier Chinese media reporting that the outbreak began at a wildlife market where the pathogen jumped from animals to humans.

Zhao posted video of Robert Redfield, head of the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), testifying to Congress that some Americans initially believed to have died from seasonal flu tested posthumously for COVID-19.

“CDC was caught on the spot,” Zhao tweeted. “When did patient zero begin in US? How many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals?”

Then he took another leap: “It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owes us an explanation!”

His demand to know about America’s “patient zero” deflected from the focus on the hunt for Wuhan’s. The city’s first known case was in mid-November, two months before China came clean about the crisis, but it is not known if he is indeed its “patient zero”.

Bill Bishop, a prominent China-watcher and editor of the Sinocism newsletter, believes the global economic woes unleashed by the pandemic help to explain China’s push to shift blam.

He said: “We might be heading into the first global recession caused by Chinese Communist Party mismanagement. That is likely one of the reasons the propaganda apparatus and officials are pushing so hard the idea that the virus may not have originated in China.”

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian. Picture: AP

Chang Ping, an exiled Chinese writer, noted the historical echoes in this operation. “In the eyes of the Chinese government, disasters are never a bad thing,” he wrote. “To be precise, it is the party that thrives in disasters.

He added: “As with every disaster in China, after things hit rock bottom, there’s no bad news left, only good news. The novel coronavirus epidemic is another opportunity for the party to sing its own praises.”

But even as Beijing’s spin machine went into overdrive, some internet users found inventive ways to spread a very different message.

A magazine interview with Ai Fen, a Wuhan doctor who was among the first to raise the alarm, was quickly erased by censors, but some online readers had already saved it.

They then foiled blocking software by translating his words into foreign languages, rendering them in braille, morse code and the “Elvish” tongue from Lord of the Rings, telling them via emojis and even embedding them in bar-codes.

The Times