[To push the idea that the virus
didn’t come from China, the government has misrepresented experts’ remarks and
given dubious theories the veneer of science.]
But Alexander Kekulé, the director
of the Institute for Biosecurity Research in Halle, Germany, has been all over
the state-run media in China in recent days. News outlets have taken Dr.
Kekulé’s research out of context to suggest that Italy,
not China, is where the coronavirus pandemic began. Photos of him have appeared
on Chinese news sites under headlines reading, “China is innocent!”
Dr. Kekulé, who has repeatedly said
that he believes the virus first
emerged in China, was startled. “This is pure propaganda,” he said in
an interview.
Facing global anger over
their initial
mishandling of the outbreak, the Chinese authorities are now trying to
rewrite the narrative of the pandemic by pushing theories that the virus
originated outside China.
In recent days, Chinese officials
have said that packaged
food from overseas might have initially brought the virus to China.
Scientists have released a paper positing that the pandemic could have started
in India. The state news media has published false stories misrepresenting
foreign experts, including Dr. Kekulé and officials at the World Health
Organization, as having said the coronavirus came from elsewhere.
The campaign seems to reflect
anxiety within the ruling Communist Party about the continuing damage to
China’s international reputation brought by the pandemic. Western officials
have criticized Beijing for trying to conceal the outbreak when it first
erupted.
The party also appears eager to
muddy the waters as the World Health Organization begins an investigation into
the question of how the virus jumped from animals to humans, a critical inquiry
that experts say is the best hope to avoid another pandemic. China, which has
greatly expanded its influence in the W.H.O. in recent years, has tightly
controlled the effort by designating Chinese scientists to lead key
parts of the investigation.
By spreading theories that
foreigners are responsible for the pandemic, the party is deploying a well-worn
playbook. The Chinese government is rarely willing to publicly address its own
shortcomings, often preferring to redirect attention elsewhere and rally the
country against a common enemy.
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has led
a vigorous effort this year to play down his government’s early failures in the
crisis, instead arguing that
the party’s success in containing the virus shows the superiority of its
authoritarian system.
The latest propaganda push gives
Mr. Xi a fresh chance to stoke nationalist sentiment and distract from
festering problems, including a lingering wealth
gap. The government seems wary of inviting renewed scrutiny of its actions
as the pandemic began to unfold, analysts say.
Mr. Xi most likely sees the party’s
missteps as a vulnerability and is eager to avoid potential challenges to his
authority at home, said Erin Baggott Carter, an assistant professor of
political science at the University of Southern California. “If Xi is able to
escape blame for the coronavirus, that reduces one major source of discontent
with his rule,” she said.
In some ways, China’s strategy
resembles efforts by
American lawmakers to distract from missteps in that country by spreading
fringe theories, including the unsubstantiated
notion that the Chinese government manufactured the virus as a
biological weapon.
For months, Chinese officials openly
spread conspiracy theories of their own, implying at one point that
the United States military could have brought the virus to the city of Wuhan.
Experts and officials are now going further, trying to give falsehoods about
the origins of the virus the veneer of scientific fact.
A recent paper by a group of
scientists affiliated with the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences indicated
that the virus could have broken out in India before spreading to China. “Wuhan
is not the place where human-to-human SARS-CoV-2 transmission first happened,”
said the paper, which appeared last month on SSRN, an online scholarly
repository. The paper, which was not peer-reviewed, had been submitted to The
Lancet, a medical journal, for publication.
After drawing wide attention in the
Chinese news media and in overseas outlets, the 22-page article vanished from
online sites. A spokeswoman for The Lancet said it had been removed from SSRN
at the request of the paper’s authors. The scientists did not respond to
requests for comment.
The article was the latest in a
series of comments and articles by Chinese scientists arguing that the virus
had first surfaced in Italy, Spain or elsewhere before spreading to China.
While recent
studies have indicated that the coronavirus may have infected people
in the United States and elsewhere earlier than previously thought, researchers
still believe the most likely explanation is that it started circulating in
China.
Edward Holmes, a professor at the
University of Sydney who has studied the coronavirus, said the idea that the
virus originated outside China seemed to be gaining traction for political
purposes. “It lacks scientific credibility and will only further fuel the
conspiracy theories,” he said.
As part of their efforts to
redirect attention toward other countries, Chinese scholars and officials have
in recent weeks revived another unproven theory: that frozen food packages from
abroad brought the virus to China. Chinese officials say they have detected the
virus on pork from Germany, shrimp from Ecuador, salmon from Norway and other
products.
While the World Health Organization
says the probability of becoming infected from coming into contact with food
and food packaging is low, Chinese officials have doubled down on the theory.
“More and more evidence suggests
that the frozen seafood or meat products probably spread the virus from
countries with the epidemic into our country,” Wu Zunyou, the chief
epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said
in a recent interview posted on a government website.
Even if the virus could spread
through frozen goods, experts say packaged food alone cannot explain why the
first major outbreak took place in Wuhan.
As it seeks to push its theories on
the global stage, the Chinese government has distorted comments from foreign
experts to falsely suggest that there is broad consensus that the virus first
surfaced outside China.
Michael Ryan, the World Health
Organization’s emergency director, spoke recently about the need for a rigorous
investigation into how the virus spread from animals to humans. “We need to
start where we found the first cases and that is in Wuhan in China,” Dr. Ryan
said at a news conference late last month in Geneva.
But in China, the government framed
Dr. Ryan’s remarks differently. The news media falsely claimed that he had said
the virus existed around the world but happened to be discovered in Wuhan.
Dr. Ryan was more explicit a few
days later, saying the idea that the virus originated outside China was “highly
speculative.” Official news outlets in China did not report that remark.
When Dr. Kekulé, the German
scientist, appeared on a television news show last month to discuss the
pandemic, he made a point of saying that it was clear the virus had first
emerged in China. During the interview, he also criticized European officials
for taking too long to detect the virus, saying it enabled Covid-19 to spread
across the globe.
Chinese news outlets seized on the
latter remarks. “He noted that for a global pandemic, the starting shot was
fired in northern Italy,” said a report by China Global Television Network, an
international arm of the official Chinese state broadcaster.
Dr. Kekulé, who has written a book
about the pandemic, was distraught and set out to correct the record, going on
German television again to say he had been misquoted.
“China uses everything for
propaganda,” Dr. Kekulé said in an interview. “I started to realize that I had
to do something about it.”
But Dr. Kekulé’s efforts were
largely in vain. Video clips of his remarks about Europe had already spread
widely on the Chinese internet. Thousands of people were sharing state media
articles about his research, leaving comments such as, “A billion people in
China thank you!” and “There are not many scientists who dare tell the truth.”
A simple phrase appeared in red
writing above Dr. Kekulé’s face in a meme that circulated online: “Not Wuhan.”
Chris Buckley contributed
reporting. Albee Zhang contributed research.
