Here's How China Is Rewriting the History of the Coronavirus Pandemic to Make Itself the Hero
The Chinese government has waged a months-long disinformation campaign to portray itself as the country the defeated the virus when it attempted to hide it for months.
By David Gilbert
31 March 2020, 6:45pm
This article originally appeared on VICE US.
At midnight on Friday China closed its borders to the rest of the world as it bids to stop a resurgence of the coronavirus.
The move was the culmination of a months-long PR and disinformation campaign waged by the Chinese government to rewrite the history of a pandemic that has spread to almost every corner of the planet, killed more than 34,000 people and infected almost three-quarters of a million.
China initially ignored the outbreak that first surfaced in Wuhan in early December, silencing doctors who tried to raise the alarm before eventually enacting a draconian and restrictive lockdown that impacted 50 million people.
But the Communist Party of China (CCP) is now seeking to portray itself not as the country that allowed the coronavirus to spread unchecked for weeks, but as the country that has defeated the virus and is now on hand to save the rest of the world.
To do this, the Chinese government has employed a unique mixture of tactics ranging from disinformation, soft power, conspiracy theories, and even a book that tells the heroic story of China’s victory over coronavirus — all of which are designed to reframe the narrative around coronavirus and Beijing’s role in allowing the virus to get out of control in the first place.
“In the last few weeks, the CCP has stepped up its propaganda efforts to shape the narrative with respect to COVID-19, both within China and internationally,” Adam Ni, director of the Australia-based research organization the China Policy Centre, told VICe News.
“In essence, the Party wants to make the best out of a terrible situation and spin the story in favor of the party by deflecting blame, sowing doubts on its culpability, whipping up nationalism, and highlighting the superiority of the Chinese party-state.”
Here’s China’s playbook: Silence dissenting voices: The outbreak in Wuhan was first noticed by doctors working on the front lines. They tried to raise the alarm by sharing messages with friends on WeChat, messages that were shared on social media and went viral. But the police detained the doctors — some of whom subsequently died of coronavirus — and told them to stay quiet.
Block information: Once Hubei province had been put into lockdown, the Chinese government didn’t want any negative information getting out. To do this it employed a mixture of tactics. One was making citizen journalists disappear after they began publishing videos from inside Wuhan exposing the sheer scale of the crisis. It also ramped up its censorship of social media platforms significantly, meaning even the slightest reference to coronavirus or the government’s response was erased.
Spin up state-run media: As stories of overwhelmed hospitals and mounting death tolls spread around the world, Beijing spun up its massive media operations into full battle mode, with both its Chinese-language and English-language outlets running positive stories about the heroic work being done to counter the outbreak. The campaign included posts on social media, news reports, and articles written by state media journalists but quietly published in other outlets. Beijing is also leveraging deep media ties across Africa to promote its own agenda.
Spread disinformation: Earlier this month, Hua Chunying a spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of China, posted a video on Twitter that showed Italians on lockdown clapping in unison and shouting "Thank you China" as appreciation for the aid Beijing sent to the country. The only problem is that the video was fake, and the applause was in fact for the heroic work being done by Italian medical workers.
Promote conspiracy theories: Earlier this month Chinese foreign ministry deputy spokesperson Zhao Lijian suggested on Twitter that the coronavirus was manufactured in a U.S. military lab and brought to Wuhan by the U.S. Army who sent 300 service personnel to the World Military Games that took place in the city in October. The unfounded claim was then given more oxygen by official Chinese state media.
Write a book: China has already produced a book on the coronavirus pandemic. “A Battle Against Epidemic: China Combating COVID-19 in 2020” is a compilation of articles from Chinese state media that recount the heroic leadership of President Xi Jinping and the vital role of the Communist Party played in combating the virus outbreak. The book is being translated into English, French, Spanish, Russian and Arabic, with more likely to follow.
Deploy a Twitter army: An investigation by ProPublica found a Twitter army directed by the Chinese government, consisting of fake and stolen accounts — that in the past was used to seed disinformation about the Hong Kong protests — have become “cheerleaders for the government, calling on citizens to unite in support of efforts to fight the epidemic and urging them to “dispel online rumors.”
Gin up more conspiracy theories: China’s state-run media last week suggested the virus may have originated in Italy, after Giuseppe Remuzzi, director of the Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research in Milan, told NPR that doctors there had noticed “very strange pneumonias” as early as November last year. Remuzzi clarified that all he meant was that it’s possible the virus had spread to Europe sooner than we thought, but the Chinese state media failed to mention those comments.
Start donating stuff: One of the key aspects of China’s efforts to change how the world views its role in the coronavirus outbreak is by sending donations of testing kits, masks and other essential supplies around the world. Leading this effort is Alibaba-founder Jack Ma, whose foundation has sent supplies to Iran, Europe, Africa, and even the U.S. No conspiracy theory is too wild: China’s latest claims that a U.S. cyclist, who was part of the Military Games team, is coronavirus patient zero. It’s source for such a claim? A U.S. conspiracy theorist who is attempting to capitalize on the pandemic to boost his social media profile.
But, is it working?
“I would say it has been quite successful inside China. Due to censorship and the lack of independent news sources, many Chinese people have bought the theory that the virus was brought by the U.S. to China,” Yaqiu Wang, a China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told VICE News. “It has helped shift public anger towards the Chinese government for its initial cover-up to the convenient external enemy – the US government.”
And, at a time when frontline medics the world over are crying out for protective equipment, China’s donations will go a long way to bolster its image abroad.
“The soft power dividends that China has gained in Africa, and also Europe as well, over the past couple of weeks through both its governmental assistance and the massive donation of masks and other medical supplies by Jack Ma is absolutely enormous,” Eric Olander, managing editor of the nonpartisan China Africa Project, told VICE News.
But not all medical supplies from China are being welcomed. There is a growing number of countries rejecting tests and other supplies for being defective.
And while the conspiracy theories may play well with a home audience, outside of China, where people generally have access to much more information about what is going on, Beijing’s ludicrous theories ring hollow, and may in fact be further damaging the country’s reputation.
“I think the Chinese movement’s claim is backfiring, as many people see it as petty and irresponsible for the Chinese government to spread these conspiracy theories,” Wang said.
Cover: In this handout photograph taken and released by the Pakistan's Press Information Department on March 28, 2020, Chinese doctors arrive at the Islamabad International airport in Islamabad. (Photo by -/PRESS INFORMATION DEPARTMENT/AFP via Getty Images)
Bloomberg
China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak, U.S. Intelligence Says
Nick Wadhams and Jennifer Jacobs
2020年4月2日 0:15 JSTUpdated on 2020年4月2日 10:08 JST
Report submitted to White House on China’s under-count
U.S. has publicly reported more than twice as many cases
U.S. Intelligence Says China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak
Unmute U.S. Intelligence Says China Concealed Extent of Virus Outbreak
China has concealed the extent of the coronavirus outbreak in its country, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it’s suffered from the disease, the U.S. intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three U.S. officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.
The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said.
Airport employees wear full body protective suits at Pudong International Airport in Shanghai on March 28.
Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg
The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3,300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4,000 deaths in the U.S., which has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.
U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that China’s reported virus data appear to be on the “light side” but that he hadn’t received an intelligence report saying the country had concealed the extent of its outbreak.
“Their numbers seem to be a little bit on the light side, and I’m being nice when I say that,” he said at a daily coronavirus briefing at the White House.
Trump added that the U.S. and China were in constant communication and that Beijing would spend $250 billion to purchase American products. “We’d like to keep it, they’d like to keep it” he said of the U.S.-China trade deal.
Communications staff at the White House and the Chinese embassy in Washington didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.
‘More Forthcoming’
“The reality is that we could have been better off if China had been more forthcoming,” Vice President Mike Pence said Wednesday on CNN. “What appears evident now is that long before the world learned in December that China was dealing with this, and maybe as much as a month earlier than that, that the outbreak was real in China.
While China eventually imposed a strict lockdown beyond those of less autocratic nations, there has been considerable skepticism toward China’s reported numbers, both outside and within the country. The Chinese government has repeatedly revised its methodology for counting cases, for weeks excluding people without symptoms entirely, and only on Tuesday added more than 1,500 asymptomatic cases to its total.
Stacks of thousands of urns outside funeral homes in Hubei province have driven public doubt in Beijing’s reporting.
Republican lawmakers in the U.S. have been particularly harsh about China’s role in the outbreak. Enhancing Beijing’s role in the pandemic could be politically helpful to Trump, who has sought to shift blame for the U.S. outbreak away from his administration’s delays in achieving widespread testing for the virus and mobilizing greater production of supplies such as face masks and hospital ventilators.
“The claim that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than China is false,” Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, said in a statement after Bloomberg News published its report. “Without commenting on any classified information, this much is painfully obvious: The Chinese Communist Party has lied, is lying, and will continue to lie about coronavirus to protect the regime.”
Deborah Birx, the State Department immunologist advising the White House on its response to the outbreak, said Tuesday that China’s public reporting influenced assumptions elsewhere in the world about the nature of the virus.
“The medical community made -- interpreted the Chinese data as: This was serious, but smaller than anyone expected,” she said at a news conference on Tuesday. “Because I think probably we were missing a significant amount of the data, now that what we see happened to Italy and see what happened to Spain.”
Suspect Reporting
The U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion is an attempt to divert attention from surging deaths in the U.S. and other Western countries, Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of China’s state-run Global Times, said on his account on Chinese social media platform Weibo.
There was no way for serious data faking to occur in today’s China, especially for an incident that has drawn such widespread attention, Hu said. He said China managed to curtail the death toll in Hubei, the province where the virus first emerged late last year, by sending medical workers and equipment there from other parts of the country.
“To fake the casualty data, which departments will be deployed? Who will implement the plan?,” Hu said. “It will involve many different departments in many places to get the total numbers. If one of them is faking once, they have to fake it all the time. The risk of screwing up could be very high.”
China isn’t the only country with suspect public reporting. Western officials have pointed to Iran, Russia, Indonesia and especially North Korea, which has not reported a single case of the disease, as probable under-counts. Others including Saudi Arabia and Egypt may also be playing down their numbers.
U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo has publicly urged China and other nations to be transparent about their outbreaks. He has repeatedly accused China of covering up the extent of the problem and being slow to share information, especially in the weeks after the virus first emerged, and blocking offers of help from American experts.
“This data set matters,” he said at a news conference in Washington on Tuesday. The development of medical therapies and public-health measures to combat the virus “so that we can save lives depends on the ability to have confidence and information about what has actually transpired,” he said.
“I would urge every nation: Do your best to collect the data. Do your best to share that information,” he said. “We’re doing that.”
— With assistance by Justin Sink
Is China hiding the real COVID-19 death toll? 21 million phones VANISH Chinese phone operators lose 21 million subscribers over COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak
Anthony Garreffa | Mar 29, 2020 at 07:07 pm CDT (3 mins, 46 secs reading time)
Beijing authorities have said that as of March 19, there have been over 21 million cell phone accounts cancelled -- while over the last 3 months they've have 840,000 landlines closed in China. Where did all these people go? What happened?
There are some eerie reports that deaths of COVID-19 in China might have "contributed to the high number of account closings", according to The Epoch Times. But, if you didn't already know -- the Chinese government require all Chinese citizens to use their smartpone to generate a health code.
US-based China affairs commentator, Tang Jingyuan, told The Epoch Times: "The digitization level is very high in China. People can't survive without a cellphone. Dealing with the government for pensions and social security, buying train tickets, shopping... no matter what people want to do, they are required to use cellphones".
Jingyuan continued, adding: "The Chinese regime requires all Chinese to use their cellphones to generate a health code. Only with a green health code are Chinese allowed to move in China now. It's impossible for a person to cancel his cellphone".
This is the part that is concerning: "It's impossible for a person to cancel his cellphone".
Chinese Cellphone Users
November 2019 data: 1,600,957,000 users (1.6 billion)
March 2020 data: 1,579,927,000 users (1.57 billion)
Drop: 21.03 million
Chinese Landline Users
November 2019 data: 190,830,000 users (190 million)
March 2020 data: 189,990,000 users (189 million)
Drop: 840,000
The data is weird though because all 3 major Chinese cellphone carriers saw an uptick in mobile subscribers going into December 2019, but it dropped in a big way in 2020.
China Mobile Cellphone Users
China Mobile is the largest cellphone carrier in China, where it owns 60% of the entire market in the country. In December 2019, China Mobile reported that it had added an additional 3.7 million accounts, but then it lost 800,000 of those in January 2020 and another (but much higher) 7.2 million in February 2020.
December 2019: 3.7 million added
January 2020: 862,000 lost
February 2020: 7.2 million lost
China Telecom Cellphone Users
China Telecom is the second-largest carrier in China, with around 21% of the market. The company also lost a significant amount of users over the last few months. Starting in December 2019 where it gained 1.18 million users, but then it lost 430,000 users in January 2020, and a massive chunk of 5.6 million in February 2020.
December 2019: 1.18 million added
January 2020: 430,000 lost
February 2020: 5.6 million lost
China Unicom Cellphone Users
China Telecom is the third-largest carrier in China, but it hasn't published its data for February 2020 just yet. We do know that they are losing subscribers like their competitors, losing 1.18 million users in January 2020.
The article does explain that the cellphone and landline accounts could've been shutdown over the vast quarantine measures not only China, but the world is going through right now. Migrant users also keep different cell phones (and thus, cell phone numbers) for both their home, and work cities -- another good explanation for the loss of users.
But then you have the comments from US-based commentator Tang Jiangyuan, who simply states it is virtually "impossible for a person to cancel his cellphone".
Extra Information: British scientists have claimed that China is lying about the total number of coronavirus COVID-19 cases, more on that story can be found here.
It may be possible for the novel coronavirus to transmit through the air, a new study released over the weekend suggests.
In a joint study by the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC), the National Strategic Research Institute at the University of Nebraska, and others, researchers found genetic material from the virus that causes COVID-19 in air samples from both in and outside of confirmed coronavirus patients’ rooms. The findings offer “limited evidence that some potential for airborne transmission exists," researchers said, though they warned that the findings do not confirm airborne spread.
CORONAVIRUS: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW
Researchers, looking to better understand viral shedding of the novel virus, took air and surface samples from 11 patients’ rooms during the initial isolation of 13 people who tested positive for COVID-19. The researchers found virus genetic material on commonly used items, such as toilets, but also in air samples, thus indicating that “SARS-CoV-2 is widely disseminated in the environment.” (SARS-CoV-2 is the name of the virus that causes COVID-19.)
Not only was the virus detected within COVID-19 patients’ rooms, “air samplers from hallways outside of rooms where [the] staff was moving in and out of doors were also positive,” they wrote.
“These findings indicate that disease might be spread through both direct (droplet and person-to-person) as well as indirect contact (contaminated objects and airborne transmission) and suggests airborne isolation precautions could be appropriate,” they concluded, noting that the findings also suggest that COVID-19 patients, even those who are only mildly ill, “may create aerosols of virus and contaminate surfaces that may pose a risk for transmission.”
HOW DOES THE CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC AFFECT CHILDREN'S MENTAL HEALTH?
The study’s authors also said that the results underscore the importance of personal protective equipment or PPEs, and the use of negative air pressure rooms for confirmed COVID-19 patients who are hospitalized.
"Our team was already taking airborne precautions with the initial patients we cared for," said James Lawler, an infectious diseases expert and director of the Global Center for Health Security at UNMC, in a statement. "This report reinforces our suspicions. It’s why we have maintained COVID patients in rooms equipped with negative airflow and will continue to make efforts to do so — even with an increase in the number of patients. Our health care workers providing care will be equipped with the appropriate level of personal protective equipment. Obviously, more research is required to be able to characterize environmental risk."
CORONAVIRUS CLAIMS LIFE OF NEW YORK CITY MAILMAN
Scientists are still working to understand how the novel virus transmits, though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says that it mainly spreads via person-to-person, such as when an infected person coughs or sneezes. Their respiratory droplets could then land in the noses and mouths of other people close by (hence why officials are urging people to stay at least six feet away from one another when in public). Touching a contaminated object — recent studies have found the virus can live on surfaces between hours and days — and then touching your eyes, nose or face with dirty hands is also a possibility.
But a recent study also found the virus may transmit through the digestive tract, specifically the fecal-oral route. Scientists from the Renmin Hospital of Wuhan University and the Wuhan Institute of Virology of the Chinese Academy of Science recently discovered virus genetic material in stool samples and rectal swabs from some patients, Chinese state media reported in February.
Madeline Farber is a Reporter for Fox News. You can follow her on Twitter @MaddieFarberUDK.
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