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.
An examination of social media posts across Weibo, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit in English, Chinese, and Japanese reveals the context and pathways that brought this particular conspiracy theory to Chinese state media and diplomatic channels. Weeks of speculation and online conspiracy theorizing about military links to the virus’ origins or emergence, combined with a broadening uncertainty about the circumstances of Wuhan’s outbreak and increasingly brittle U.S.-China rhetoric, laid the groundwork for Zhao’s inflammatory tweets and the reaction that followed.
In the spiraling relations between China and the West, even the COVID-19 crisis is an opportunity to score points—and no opportunity can be wasted. The Trump Administration has obfuscated its torpid response to the crisis by repeating concerns over China’s official figures. In turn, Beijing has sought to boost its soft power by recasting itself from source of the deadly pandemic to the provider of much-needed aid and expertise. On Tuesday, as rows of field hospitals were being built to treat COVID-19 patients in New York City’s Central Park, a plane load of medical supplies arrived in the city from China.
“The first of 22 scheduled flights to help slow the spread of #Covid_19 in the #US,” said the state-run China Daily in a tweet. But it is Europe that has become the key propaganda battleground. In a recent blog post, E.U. chief diplomat Josep Borrell warned that the “politics of generosity” concealed “a geo-political component including a struggle for influence.” China, he added, “is aggressively pushing the message that, unlike the U.S., it is a responsible and reliable partner … Armed with facts, we need to defend Europe against its detractors.” Theories Involving the U.S. Military Circulated on Social Media as Early as January Speculation or conspiracy theory writings about a potential role for the U.S. military in Wuhan’s outbreak circulated weeks before Zhao, the Foreign Ministry spokesperson, amplified the idea on Twitter.
Since several platforms have pledged to remove disinformation related to the origin of the coronavirus, and our research started in mid-March, some materials could have been removed. Still, speculation about a U.S. role can be traced at least as far back as January. Though the earliest speculation did not necessarily catch on, some early references include: January 2: a Chinese-language YouTube channel had shared a video dismissing the idea that the pneumonia in Wuhan was the result of U.S. genetic warfare, which could imply at least some dissemination of the idea prior to this. January 20: a Twitter user claimed the virus was 90% similar to one that had earlier been reported to a U.S. viral gene database. January 21: another Twitter account wrote plainly that the “pneumonia of unknown origin in Wuhan” was caused by a “biochemical weapon developed by the U.S. military.” January 31: a video appearing to be an old TV segment on alleged U.S. biological warfare during the Korean war was shared to YouTube with a title asking, “Were SARS, MERS, and COVID-19 U.S. Plots?”
By February 1, Twitter activity included speculation that the virus was linked to U.S. attendance at the Military World Games, which took place in Wuhan in October 2019—an idea that featured in the conspiracy theory article Zhao shared almost six weeks later.
One account posted messages in response to CNN and BBC reporting claiming that the virus emerged near the hotel where U.S. participants stayed. The coronavirus has given rise to a flood of conspiracy theories, disinformation and propaganda, eroding public trust and undermining health officials in ways that could elongate and even outlast the pandemic. Claims that the virus is a foreign bioweapon, a partisan invention or part of a plot to re-engineer the population have replaced a mindless virus with more familiar, comprehensible villains. Each claim seems to give a senseless tragedy some degree of meaning, however dark. Rumors of secret cures — diluted bleach, turning off your electronics, bananas — promise hope of protection from a threat that not even world leaders can escape. The belief that one is privy to forbidden knowledge offers feelings of certainty and control amid a crisis that has turned the world upside down. And sharing that “knowledge” may give people something that is hard to come by after weeks of lockdowns and death: a sense of agency.
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