The Coming China Backlash There is a pent-up volcano of rage against the Chinese regime for its reckless coverup of a devouring pandemic. by Richard Javad Heydarian

A generation has died in just over two weeks. We’ve never seen anything like this and it just makes you cry,” lamented a funeral director in northern Italian city of Bergamo, the epicenter of a coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak in recent months. As a testament to the scale of a historic tragedy unfolding at the heart of Europe, the city’s local newspaper, L’Eco di Bergamo, dedicated ten pages to obituaries on March 13. The head of respiratory unit of the city’s Hospital Papa Giovanni XXIII, Dr. Fabiano Di Marco, put it this way: “It’s like a war.” In fact, the Italian armed forces have been reportedly deployed to assist in the burial of countless victims across the country. 

In an even more bizarre turn of events, China is now imposing strict restrictions on tourists and citizens returning from Europe and elsewhere. Instead of Beijing’s much-vaunted “One Belt, One Road,” what the world is confronting a “One Belt, One Plague” reality across the Eurasian landmass, stretching from China’s east coast to the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean, if not the North Sea. The question, therefore is: What’s next?   

With clear evidence of systematic cover up by Chinese authorities in the early stages of the emerging pandemic, a growing number of people around the world are seeking criminal accountability. A recent expose by the Associated Press, based on internal Chinese documents, shows that for almost an entire week in mid-January Beijing withheld information even when the true extent of the pandemic threat became crystal clear.  

In a telltale of things to come, one group in Dallas is suing the Chinese government for $20 trillion in damages. In a recent report, titled “Coronavirus Compensation?,” Britain’s conservative think tank The Henry Jackson Society raised the possibility of a  £3.2 trillion  lawsuit against China on ten possible legal avenues, including the violation of International Health Regulations. Meanwhile, Germany’s largest paper Bild sent a symbolic invoice of €149 billion to China for damages caused to the European country.  

The newspaper’s editor-in-chief Julian Reichelt lashed out at China’s President Xi Jinping, stating: “You, your government and your scientists had to know long ago that coronavirus is highly infectious, but you left the world in the dark about it. Your top experts didn’t respond when Western researchers asked to know what was going on in Wuhan. You were too proud and too nationalistic to tell the truth, which you felt was a national disgrace.” 

Always eager to deflect accountability, the Communist Regime in Beijing seems to have anticipated the gathering storm of the greatest torrent of anti-China sentiments in recent memory by launching its own counter-offensive, including the bizarre claim that the contagion is an American biowarfare conspiracy. We don’t know what the exact trajectory of the pandemic will be, given the differential levels of responses by a complex array of institutions around the world. But what’s clear is that, geopolitically speaking, this is going to get very ugly in coming months and even years to come.

The New Chernobyl 

“I have seen the Future and it works,” declared the muckraker American journalist Lincoln Steffens following an exuberant visit to the Soviet Union on the eve of World War I. Overwhelmed by the grandeur of Stalinist utopian projects, Western visitors, who were largely and carefully confined to the Potemkin Villages, couldn’t resist elegiac reviews of the most self-conscious ideological project of the twentieth century. 

Over the next decades, however, the rotten core of the Lenist-Marxist system became crystal clear. Politically, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, and later brutal suppression of the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia, heavily undermined its supposed commitment to the freedom and independence of smaller nations. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn dealt a fatal blow to the Soviet’s claims of moral ascendancy by exposing the indubitably bankrupt dystopian reality in Russia’s peripheries, above all the Gulags in the vast Siberian wastelands.  

Economically, came the Great Stagnation, most apparent during the Brezhnev years, but rooted in white elephant projects such as the Trans-Siberia Railway plan, not to mention prohibitively unsustainable defense spending reaching above 60 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in mid-1940s and settling at around 20 percent until the twilight years of Cold War. The Chernobyl disaster, however, crystallized simmering worries about the fundamental integrity of the Soviet system of social organization.  

Not long after the nuclear disaster, which threatened tens of millions in north-eastern Europe and beyond, the world entered Fukyama’s “End of History”, as the Soviet project slid into the dustbin of history as the last great ideological rival to Western civilizational project.  

The coronavirus pandemic is China’s version of Chernobyl, though more ambiguously and more destructively. On the surface, China is no Soviet Union. It’s integral to the global economy, responsible for almost a third of global GDP growth in recent years. In many ways, it’s immanent to the functioning of universal capitalism. It’s bureaucracy, one of the world’s oldest, has been hailed for its emphasis on competence and dynamism, most famously by venture capitalist Eric Li. Unlike the Soviet’s largely isolated and extractive economy, China is the world’s factory and increasingly a dominant player in cutting-edge industries, including artificial intelligence. 

So impressed are some by China’s strides in new-generation technologies that the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harrari has postulated the dominance of digital authoritarianism in the twenty-first century in contrast to the decisive victory of the West’s Hayekian spontaneous organization in the preceding century. China is rich, prosperous and technologically advanced in ways the Soviet Union never war, or could ever become. As progressive thinkers such as Perry Anderson have pointed out, systemic dynamism was central to the Chinese communist revolution in ways its Russian counterpart never was. Others would argue almost ontologically, namely that China is just so vast, dynamic and complex that it remains largely unknown, including to its own ruling elite.

World War C  

Throughout the first two decades of the post–Cold War period, China opportunistically sailed on the crest of American-led economic globalization. The upshot of this seemingly symbiotic Sino-Western dynamic was what Joshua Cooper-Ramo famously termed as the “Beijing Consensus”: namely, a post-ideological commitment to mercantilist “win-win” intercourse with the world, especially the post-colonial realm. It was not until the tale end of the Hu Jintao administration, which coincided with the Great Recession, that the we began to see a new assertiveness in Beijing, as the inheritor of a millennia-old imperial tradition began to carve out its own global Empire on the cheap. Instead of an “end of history”, what we soon got was President Xi Jinping’s, the world’s most powerful strongman, “Chinese Dream” and hopes for a “Great Rejuvenation” of the one of the world’s oldest empires-in-disguise.  

Upon closer examination, China is the Soviet Union, but in a very specific and consequential way. Since the ascent of Xi, the country has appropriated Maoist politics with disturbing consequences for systemic stability. In particular, the massive purge of rivals, ostensibly on corruption charges, has unleashed a tsunami of fear and trembling, which has incentivized cover up and sycophancy like never before.  

In the words of China expert Minxin Pei, “pathological secrecy hobbles the authorities’ capacity to respond quickly to epidemics,” because “[t]o maintain its authority, the Communist Party of China must keep the public convinced that everything is going according to plan. That means carrying out systemic cover-ups of scandals and deficiencies that may reflect poorly upon the CPC’s leadership, instead of doing what is necessary to respond.” This may explain the recurrence of epidemics in China, mainly thanks to reckless failure to rein in illegal and highly liberalized wildlife trade at home.  

Crucially, China-based investigative journalists at Caixin Global have revealed that scientists were instructed to destroy the evidence of a new SARS-like virus almost three month ago—to the detriment of the whole world. As a Wuhan based journalist lamented, “Everyone must understand, first of all, that this epidemic was allowed to spread for a period of more than forty days before . . . any decisive action taken.”  

To put the crisis into context, the Wuhan journalist explains, echoing Pei’s argument, “the main efforts undertaken by the leadership, and by provincial and city governments in particular…were focused mostly not on the containment of the epidemic itself, but on the containment and suppression of information about the disease.” Thus, the widespread outrage and calls for press freedom across China following the death of Li Wenliang, one of the “brave eight” heroes, who exposed the true nature of the epidemic threat last year.  

President Donald Trump has come under repeated attacks for using the term “Chinese Virus,” instead of the politically correct coronavirus. What his critics, who correctly warn against fanning the flames of anti-Asian xenophobia, often overlook is that the pandemic is largely a responsibility of the Chinese authorities, especially in Wuhan. It’s not racist to point out the culpability of the ruling regime, in as much as we should stand in solidarity with ordinary Chinese people, who are as much, if not greater, victims of the contemporary system of repression  

In Albert Camus’ The Plague, the protagonist helplessly laments, “I have no idea what's awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.” But the world is also angry, and there is a pent-up volcano of rage against the Chinese regime for its reckless coverup of a devouring pandemic. Trump’s aggressive rhetoric and trade wars against China may seem a mild version of what’s to come, no matter who wins this November’s elections.  

Coronavirus Shows That Fears About Automation Are Overblown The coronavirus pandemic might spur lots of companies to think harder about automation. by James Pethokoukis

The coronavirus pandemic might spur lots of companies to think harder about automation. For instance: Not only might more commerce be online, but more of the future workers in those warehouses and fulfillment centers might be robots. That’s tomorrow, however, not today. If anything, this outbreak has undercut the idea that somehow we are on the verge of a job apocalypse. As journalist Matt Simon writes in Wired: 

This economic catastrophe is blowing up the myth of the worker robot and AI takeover. We’ve been led to believe that a new wave of automation is here, made possible by smarter AI and more sophisticated robots. … The problem will get so bad, argue folks like former presidential candidate Andrew Yang, we’ll need a universal basic income to support our displaced human workers. … Yet our economy still craters without human workers, because the machines are far, far away from matching our intelligence and dexterity.

Yet little has changed for the folks who touted UBI as a key response to the impending robot takeover. They see all that federal cash being deposited in our accounts as a sort of proto-UBI that will get more Americans comfortable with the notion of Washington regularly sending them a check. Still, we should spare a moment to remember their original thesis: The machines are coming for us.

Then again, maybe not. Some of the most interesting work being done on the true employment threat posed by modern automation is being done by Boston University’s James Bessen. And one of the big takeaways from his research is that automation tends to eliminate some of the tasks that constitute a particular job, but not all them. Rarely are entire jobs automated away, although they might change a lot. And even the jobs that disappear might experience an extremely long decline. This from a late 2019 analysis co-written by Bessen:

Consider what happened to the 271 detailed occupations used in the 1950 Census by 2010 (Bessen 2016). Many occupations were eliminated for a variety of reasons, but few of these were automated away. In many cases, demand for the occupational services declined (e.g., boardinghouse keepers); in some cases, demand declined because of technological obsolescence (e.g., telegraph operators). This, however, is not the same as automation. In only one case—elevator operators—can the decline and disappearance of an occupation be largely attributed to automation. Nevertheless, this 60-year period witnessed extensive automation, but it was almost entirely partial automation. 

 Indeed, when examining companies today in the Netherlands, Bessen finds that automating firms tend to grow employment faster than other firms, both before and after the automation event — although “it is entirely possible that [employment] does not rise as fast as it would have otherwise.” And there was pain for workers at the companies that had an automating event. Again from the study:

We study the impact of automation on incumbent workers, those workers who were employed at their firm for three or more years before the automation event. Over the five years following automation, these workers lose, on average, about 11% of one year’s earnings or, in absolute terms, 3,800 euros. These losses could arise from lower wages or from spells of non-employment. In fact, the daily wage rate does not change for these workers. These workers do not appear to experience reduced wage rates either if they stay at their firm or if they move. The lost earnings come from spells of non-employment attributed to automation. These total 18 days per worker on average (for both leavers and stayers) over five years.

 Relatedly, we see an increase in the share of incumbent workers who leave their firms attributable to automation, although we do not know whether these workers were laid off or left of their own choice. During the year of the automation event, about 2% more of the incumbent workers leave by comparison to the control group. Over five years, the cumulative separations is less than 13%. The separations following automation appear to occur as a trickle rather than as a mass layoff. These separating workers are offset by new hires at the firm, although it appears that the new hires do not fully offset the separations during the first years after the automation. However, our focus here is on the impact on incumbent workers regardless whether they are replaced or not. And the evidence shows a significant, although not overwhelming, loss of income and days worked.

In other words, the employment effects are disruptive rather than apocalyptic. The policy challenge is about helping workers transition to new jobs or industries, not permanent unemployment: “[Policy] measures might include re-training, relocation assistance, and temporary income support. On the other hand, existing policies that discourage or hamper worker transitions, such as employee noncompete agreements, could be viewed as problematic.”

Coronavirus Paradox: Why Food Is Being Destroyed When People Are Going Hungry This highlights both short- and long-term problems with the food system. by Elizabeth Ransom, E. Melanie DuPuis and Michelle R. Worosz

Many Americans may be surprised and confused to see farmers dumping milk down the drain or letting vegetables rot in their fields. 

Why would they be destroying food at a time when grocery stores and food pantries struggle to keep pace with surging demand during the coronavirus pandemic?

As sociologists with a specialty in agriculture and food, we study how the structure of the food system affects people’s lives and the environment. Seeing food destroyed at a time when people are going hungry highlights both short- and long-term problems with this system.

A tale of two supply chains

Surprisingly, the supply chain for food bears a striking similarity to that of another product that has experienced shortages: toilet paper.

Like the toilet paper market, the food industry has two separate supply chains for consumer and commercial use. On the consumer side are grocery and convenience stores that focus on small purchases. The commercial side represents restaurants and institutions such as schools, prisons, hospitals and corporate cafeterias that purchase large quantities of foods in bulk. Ultimately, commercial institutions purchase in sizes that exceed the storage capacity of most households and food pantries.

While the commercial and the consumer supply chains are different, there are some commonalities: Both are complex, cover long distances and rely on just-in-time production. Both are also increasingly concentrated, meaning that there are only a few companies between farmers and consumers that process and distribute raw agricultural goods into edible food. For example, on the commercial side, Sysco and U.S. Foods control an estimated 75% of the market for food distribution.

These characteristics make the supply chains more vulnerable to disruptions.

In 2018, over half of all U.S. spending on food was on the commercial side of the supply chain. The introduction of social distancing measures in March forced schools, corporate cafeterias and many restaurants to close. As a result, a lot of food intended for commercial use no longer had a buyer.

Where the supply chains diverge

To understand why this food can’t readily be diverted to consumers, let’s take a closer look at the supply chains for meat, vegetables and milk. With each category, there are different reasons.

Vegetable farmers, for example, have a lot of crops growing in their fields intended for commercial buyers like schools, restaurants and cruise lines, which are no longer purchasing these products.

But a worsening labor shortage makes it a lot harder to harvest or pick their crops and package them for consumers.

So a combination of plunging commercial demand, not enough low-wage yet skilled laborers, falling prices and a short window in which to pick vegetables means it has become cheaper to simply let them rot in the fields.

As for meat, restaurants typically order larger cuts and use more of the pricier parts like tenderloins. In contrast, much of the meat purchased on the consumer side is sold in “case-ready” packages, and ground beef is far more common.

So in general, commercial buyers tend to buy parts of the cow or pig that consumers simply don’t prepare at home. But what’s more, meat plant closures due to COVID-19 outbreaks are creating a bottleneck for slaughtering and processing animals, which also have a short window before they’re past their prime. As a result, producers, particularly pork farmers, are debating whether to feed and care for their animals past their prime or simply euthanize them.

Milk is even more complicated when it comes to how it flows along the food chain.

First, there’s no stopping cows giving milk; udders that are full must be emptied daily. The only question is where that milk will go.

Restaurants and organizations like schools purchase nearly half of all milk, butter and other dairy products processed in the U.S. Pizzerias alone take nearly a quarter of all U.S. cheese production.

With many of these customers closed or cutting their purchases, there’s lots of excess milk. Unfortunately, processors do not have the equipment to package that milk into smaller containers for grocery stories and retail use.

As for converting more milk into dairy products with longer shelf lives like cheese, there was already a glut of mozzarella and other cheese plugging up cold storage space. And despite a rise in takeout pizza, overall demand for cheese has “dropped like a rock,” according to trade industry sources.

That has left dairy farmers with little choice but to dump excess milk into manure ponds and ditches.

A longer-term problem

Many states are working on short-term solutions to bridge the gap between the two supply chains.

Nebraska is temporarily allowing restaurants to sell unlabeled packaged foods to customers, Texas is pushing restaurants to prepare food care packages for at-risk families, and many other states have changed their health regulations to allow restaurants to repackage products into smaller quantities to sell to the public.

In addition, the U.S. Department of Agriculture plans to begin purchasing US$3 billion in fresh produce, dairy and meat to support farmers and eventually distribute it to food pantries and other organizations feeding Americans in need.

Although helpful in the short term, we believe a longer-term problem that needs to be addressed is how concentrated food supply chains have become, which has made them less nimble in adapting to disruptions like a health pandemic.

Big Government Slowed Down Our Coronavirus Response—And They Still Haven't Learned Here's why. by Chris Edwards

Governments often fail because they tend not to learn lessons. They make similar mistakes over and over for reasons described in this study. 

The FDA botched its Covid‐​19 response by using its regulatory powers to monopolize the development of virus tests. I have not heard any apologies for the failure or that any officials have been fired. As a Wall Street Journal investigation of HHS leadership suggests, the gross testing failure has led to lots of finger pointing, but not institutional reforms.

After the testing debacle, one might think that federal leaders would hesitate to impose further one‐​size‐​fits‐​all solutions for Covid‐​19. But no—the Wall Street Journal reports that House Democrats want to require OSHA “to order all companies to implement comprehensive plans to protect workers who continue in their jobs during the pandemic. The new, emergency standard would have to be issued within seven days after any legislation is signed into law.”

Thus, in seven days federal bureaucrats would apparently write‐​up a Giant Safety Plan to impose on millions of businesses in hundreds of industries across our huge and diverse nation. That makes no sense.

Federal policymakers seem to have little comprehension that their actions often sideline the vast brain power and innovation that lives outside of Washington. At the stroke of a pen, federal regulations nullify the experimentation, dynamism, and speed that America’s private sector can mobilize to solve problems.

As they consider imposing Covid‐​19 safety regulations, policymakers should ponder the pro‐​active steps that businesses are already taking or actively considering, as discussed in another Wall Street Journal article. Businesses are separating workspaces, taking temperatures and screening health at work entrances, testing employees before they get to work, closing lunch rooms, installing workspace partitions, adjusting shifts, modifying production lines, changing entrances and exits, closing facilities and tracing contacts if workers test positive, placing materials down rather than handing them to others, sanitizing workspaces, having safety experts instruct workers, spacing bathroom urinals, wearing electronic bands to alert workers if others are too close, and providing masks, gloves, and hand sanitizer.

A central plan quickly thrown together in Washington could not impose a “best” way for millions of businesses to install these sorts of changes. Every business is unique. Here are some reasons why allowing businesses to address their own safety challenges is superior to top‐​down federal mandates:

Trial‐​and‐​Error. The Journal story puts a negative spin on diverse business approaches to safety as a “patchwork” and “ad hoc.” But anyone who studies innovation knows that trial‐​and‐​error processes are crucial to economic and societal improvements. Private institutions change direction all the time as they try different things and receive feedback from stakeholders. To discover the best ways to adjust each workplace for Covid‐​19, businesses need the freedom to experiment and to change course.

Government regulations undermine the steady improvements that are the hallmark of markets and free societies. Imposing Covid‐​19 safety regulations would reduce business incentives to implement new and better approaches. The question around every workplace would change from “Are we doing this safely and can we do it better?” to “Are we conforming to the OSHA rules?”

Horizontal Learning. Volkswagen is reopening some of its European factories after making 100 workplace changes. VW has been flooded with requests from other businesses about the safety procedures it is using, and so the company has posted its ideas online. American businesses are also studying Chinese businesses that were able to open safely. This sort of horizontal learning is superior to the often‐​ill‐​informed edicts from Washington. Similarly, horizontal sharing of resources during crises is better than vertical intervention, as discussed here.

Costs and Benefits. In theory, federal bureaucrats are supposed to design regulations by comparing the costs and benefits of various possible rules, but the process is a crude way of making decisions in an economy, even after rules have been studied for years. In the current crisis, regulators would have little time to even try and make balanced decisions. Business leaders know their own facilities, employees, and customers, and they can make better reopening decisions based on their local knowledge.

Flexibility. The nature of the Covid‐​19 threat will change over time. Scientists may learn more about virus transmission on surfaces and in the air. Drugs may be developed to reduce the health risks. New safety approaches and technologies may be developed. As such, businesses need the freedom to adjust their safety procedures over time. Regulations would lock‐​in rules that may be quickly outdated as conditions change.

Department of Homeland Security Study: Heat and Humidity Kill the Coronavirus Could warm weather bring a reprieve? by Fred Lucas

A new Department of Homeland Security study shows that heat, humidity, and sunlight could help to kill the coronavirus, offering a potential literal ray of hope against the pandemic as summer nears.  

“Our most striking observation to date is the powerful effect that solar light appears to have on killing the virus both [on] surfaces and in the air,” Bill Bryan, the head of the DHS science and technology directorate, said Thursday at the White House press briefing. “We’ve seen a similar effect with both temperature and humidity as well where increasing the temperature or humidity or both is generally less favorable to the virus.” 

Bryan pointed to displayed charts that showed on surfaces with temperature between 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit, and 20% humidity, the half-life of the coronavirus was 18 hours.

When humidity was cranked up to 80%, the half-life dropped to six hours. With temperature at 95 degrees and 80% humidity, the half-life of the virus was only one hour. It even worked with no sunlight. 

Bryan said the test was done on nonporous surfaces such as door handles and stainless steel. 

“As the temperature increases, as the humidity increases, with no sun involved, you can see how drastically that half-life goes down on that virus,” Bryan said. “The virus is dying at a much more rapid pace just from exposure to higher temperatures and just from exposure to humidity.”

Bryan stressed that this is not a reason to stop social distancing in summer months, and that continued testing will be done. 

President Donald Trump was enthusiastic that outdoors might be preferred to indoors. 

“I think a lot of people are going to go outside all of a sudden. People that didn’t want to go outside, they’ll be going,” Trump said.

Even before Bryan’s presentation, Vice President Mike Pence said the White House coronavirus task force looked forward to early summer. 

“Our task force actually believes, Mr. President, that if we continue these mitigation efforts in the days ahead as states implement their policies, including phased reopenings that will preserve those gains, we do believe that by early summer we can be in a much better place as a nation with much of this coronavirus pandemic behind us,” Pence said. 

Pence said that 16 states have released formal reopening plans—13 of those since the Trump administration issued its three-phase “Opening up America” guidelines for governors last week. 

“To your point, Mr. President, states are beginning to make those plans,” Pence said. “We are encouraged to see so many states embrace the phased approach to reopen their economies.”

However, in response to a question, Trump again expressed his anger with Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp for allowing spas, salons, tattoo parlors, and other similar businesses where germs can easily spread to reopen. 

“I want the states to open more than he does,” Trump said, adding, “I wasn’t happy with it and I wasn’t happy with Brian Kemp. I wasn’t at all happy, and I could have done something about it if I wanted to, but I’m saying let the governors do it. But I wasn’t happy with Brian Kemp.”

On another front, many hospitals across the country feeling financial strain from the COVID-19 virus heard welcome news. 

“Given the unique burden on hospitals, we are now encouraging states to restart elective surgeries wherever possible, either statewide or on a county-by-county basis,” Pence said. “We recognize the role elective surgeries play in finances for local hospitals. We will be working with states to enable that.”

China’s Coronavirus Information Offensive Beijing Is Using New Methods to Spin the Pandemic to Its Advantage. By Laura Rosenberger

A billboard thanking Xi Jinping for China’s coronavirus assistance in Belgrade, Serbia, April 2020

From the first days of COVID-19’s appearance in the city of Wuhan, China’s leaders focused on control—not only of the coronavirus itself but also of information about it. They suppressed initial reporting and research about the outbreak, thereby slowing efforts to understand the virus and its pandemic potential. They called for “increased internet control” when the Politburo Standing Committee met in early February. They even sent “Internet police” to threaten people posting criticism of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its handling of the virus.

Before long, that effort at controlling information went global. As it began to contain the outbreak within its own borders, Beijing launched an assertive external information campaign aimed at sculpting global discussion of its handling of the virus. This campaign has clear goals: to deflect blame from Beijing’s own failings and to highlight other governments’ missteps, portraying China as both the model and the partner of first resort for other countries. Some of this campaign’s elements are familiar, focused on promoting and amplifying positive narratives about the CCP while suppressing information unfavorable to it. But in recent weeks, Beijing has taken a more aggressive approach than usual, even experimenting with tactics drawn from Russia’s more nihilistic information operations playbook. That strategy aims not so much to promote a particular idea as to sow doubt, dissension, and disarray—including among Americans—in order to undermine public confidence in information and prevent any common understanding of facts from taking hold.

“BE TRANSPARENT!”     

When reports of the novel coronavirus surfaced in December, the CCP at first focused on suppressing them—most notoriously by punishing the “whistleblower doctor” Li Wenliang, who later succumbed to the virus about which he had tried to sound the alarm. (Censors were overwhelmed by the eruption of online tributes following his death, some of which invoked the song “Do You Hear the People Sing?” from Les Misérables—a rallying cry for protesters in Hong Kong—or cited the article in the Chinese constitution that provides for freedom of expression.) But as China began to get the virus’s spread under control internally and outbreaks started outside its borders, the focus changed.

Seizing the fortunate timing and vacuum of global leadership, China began sending medical aid to European countries facing outbreaks (some items proved substandard or defective)—along with an aggressive messaging strategy to tout this assistance. Chinese officials and media sought to paper over their own failings and recast China as the leader in a global response to the pandemic. This tactic was particularly prevalent in Italy, the first European country to be hard hit by the virus (and which formally signed on to China’s Belt and Road Initiative last year). The Chinese embassy there embraced the hashtag #ForzaCinaeItalia (“Let’s Go, China and Italy”), which Italian researchers found was then heavily amplified by a network of bots on Twitter.

Yet these positive narratives about Chinese aid have been accompanied by more negative messages, focused especially on the failings of the United States. Chinese officials and media have criticized Washington’s slow response to the virus. The Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian tweeted: “Countries like Singapore, ROK took necessary measures & put the epidemics under control because they made full use of this precious time China bought for the world. As for whether US availed itself of this window, I believe the fact is witnessed by US &the world.” The always trolling Hu Xijin, editor in chief of Global Times (an English-language offshoot of the CCP’s People’s Daily), tweeted, “What really messed up the world is failure of the US in containing the pandemic.” A press release issued by the Chinese embassy in Paris hailed the success of China’s “dictatorship” over the United States’ “flagship of democracy,” pushing the message that Beijing’s model is superior and that it, rather than Washington, is the reliable partner to countries in need. In what could be called projection, Chinese officials and CCP media outlets have even criticized the United States for a lack of transparency about the virus’s spread. “Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!” tweeted Zhao Lijian. Notably, state media outlets have paid to promote these stories to U.S. audiences, in undisclosed political ads on Facebook and Instagram—platforms that are blocked in China.

These voices have not stopped at mere criticism. They have actively pushed disinformation about the origin of the coronavirus, including on Twitter (which is also blocked within China). The most prominent conspiracy theory—that the virus actually originated in the United States—first circulated internally in China, with the apparent assent of censors. It broke through to an external audience when Zhao Lijian tweeted an article from a known pro-Kremlin conspiracy website alleging that the virus originated in a U.S. bioweapons lab and was spread by the U.S. Army. More than a dozen Chinese ambassadors and embassies, from South Africa to France, amplified the story on Twitter, and the tweet went viral. Even after Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai disavowed it, other Chinese officials and media outlets have continued to spread it. Global Times piled on with another theory, twisting the words of an Italian scientist to suggest that the virus actually may have started in Italy.

Beyond overt information campaigns, Chinese operatives have also engaged in covert efforts to manipulate information and sow chaos—even amplifying false text messages that went viral in the United States in mid-March warning in panicked tones that Trump was about to order a two-week national quarantine. The messages caused such panic that the National Security Council took the unusual step of tweeting that they were false.

These efforts reflect changes not just in Beijing’s message but also in the mechanisms by which it is transmitted. Over the past year, the number of Chinese diplomats and embassies on Twitter has grown by more than 250 percent. On other Western social media platforms, the government has undertaken aggressive advertising to grow its audience; Chinese state media outlets, such as Global Times, CGTN, and Xinhua, represent several of the fastest-growing media pages on Facebook, according to research from Freedom House. And the Chinese government has invested billions of dollars in its foreign media presence, creating wider channels to distribute Beijing’s messages to external audiences.

INFORMATION IS POWER

Beijing has long understood that harnessing information can be a means of exercising geopolitical power. Particularly under President Xi Jinping, CCP doctrine has emphasized the importance of “discourse power”—“Beijing’s aspirations not only to have the right to speak on the international stage but also to be listened to, to influence others’ perceptions of China, and eventually to shape the discourse and norms that underpin the international order,” as Nadège Rolland of the National Bureau of Asian Research has described it. But China’s external information efforts have typically focused on promoting positive narratives (as with its COVID-19-related assistance) and suppressing criticism. China’s expulsion of reporters from The Wall Street Journal in retaliation for coverage of underreporting data on the virus’s spread and a controversially titled op-ed on its handling of the outbreak is consistent with its long-standing posture toward critical information. But new elements of China’s information strategy represent a departure from past practice—suggesting that Chinese officials see its usual approach as insufficient to the current crisis and are thus resorting to more extreme measures.

For those, Beijing seems to have looked to Moscow, which focuses less on promoting a positive image of Russia and instead aims to sow confusion and deflect blame. Russian officials, diplomats, and state media regularly promote extreme views, conspiracy theories, and doubts about democratic institutions on social media, while networks of covert accounts spread divisive or conspiratorial content without the fingerprints of the state. For example, the coordinated use of diplomatic accounts to spread disinformation—in the form of multiple, conflicting narratives meant to muddy rather than supplant the truth—has been a key part of the Kremlin’s playbook. In 2014, when Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine by Russian-provided missiles, Russian officials pushed outlandish claims about a Ukrainian fighter jet being the real culprit or President Vladimir Putin’s jet the real target. In 2018, after Russian military intelligence’s poisoning of the former KGB agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom, they spread theories pinning the blame on everyone from the Americans to the Georgians. China’s recent promotion of known conspiracy-theory websites is another move taken from the Russian playbook. And all of this comes at a time of broader intersection between the messaging of Chinese, Russian, and Iranian state information actors: Russian and Iranian state media account for two of the top five most retweeted news outlets by Chinese officials and media.

Whether or not this more negative approach marks a permanent break from China’s previous strategy, it is part of a clear trend. During the Hong Kong protests last year, Beijing began experimenting with covert information operations on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, using false personas and pages that aimed to discredit the protesters by portraying them as violent. And Chinese officials and media have promoted conspiracy theories about both the Hong Kong protests (alleging that the United States is behind them) and the treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang (sharing stories from a conspiracy site to dismiss research by “U.S.- and NATO-funded” institutions on camps in Xinjiang as “lies”). Like the Hong Kong protests, the COVID-19 information campaign may be another opportunity for Beijing to update its information arsenal.

At least some of these efforts may be intended as an internal bank shot: by sowing doubt externally about the virus’s origins, the CCP can reinforce that view within China without officially promoting it. Indeed, Beijing’s strategy is likely driven both by insecurity at home and by opportunism abroad. Through its combination of positive and negative messaging, the CCP has been able to persuade the Chinese people not only that its model is an example for the world but also that the CCP is pushing back on efforts to blame China—and ethnically Chinese people—for the virus. Racist and xenophobic tropes about the virus and anti-Chinese hate crimes—which state media have aggressively recounted to audiences within China—have only helped the CCP, allowing it to stoke nationalism, dismiss criticism of China’s handling of the virus as racism, and present itself as defending the honor of the Chinese people.

MIXED SIGNALS

This aggressive new information strategy carries risks for Beijing, and in some quarters it seems to be backfiring. Lashing out at the United States, spreading disinformation, and amplifying conspiracy sites risk undermining any positive image China has managed to develop. Simultaneously portraying itself as a responsible global provider of public goods while engaging in irresponsible behavior online sends contradictory signals.

But the strategy may nonetheless succeed if democracies around the world don’t counter it wisely with their own affirmative strategy for the ongoing information contest of which this episode is just the latest chapter. So far, Washington has if anything played into Beijing’s hands. Its bungled initial response to the novel coronavirus and failure to coordinate with allies created openings for China to present itself as a more reliable partner than the United States. The United States’ refusal to sign on to a G-7 statement because other countries would not agree to use the term “Wuhan virus” undermined a multilateral effort and gave the CCP a propaganda win.

Washington should seize the opportunity to coordinate with European allies, who are increasingly concerned about China’s play for influence. European Union High Representative Josep Borrell explicitly called out the way in which the “politics of generosity” is being weaponized for geopolitical purposes in a “struggle for influence.” French President Emmanuel Macron similarly urged Europeans not to be “intoxicated” with the narratives that China and Russia have pushed alongside their aid as a means of dividing Europeans internally. But while others in his administration have called out China’s disinformation efforts, U.S. President Donald Trump has excused them because “every country does it.”

Democracies cannot win the information contest with authoritarian regimes such as China’s by adopting their tactics. Instead, the United States needs to embrace transparency—including acknowledging its own failings and promoting accurate information—and work with its democratic partners and allies on a shared approach. China will succeed in using the pandemic to “emerge from the wreckage as more of a global leader than it began,” as Mira Rapp-Hooper has written, only if the United States lets it.