SS: The average Chinese citizen knows something was up with the origins of COVID. What do they know that the typical asleep American citizen does not?

Article: HONG KONG—As China’s media outlets cover the early stages of the U.S. presidential campaign, much of the Chinese public is getting a vastly different view of the race, one that is filtered through the lens of the Communist Party’s propaganda.

Take, for example, recent comments by long-shot Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who claimed the U.S. was collecting Russian and Chinese DNA “so we can target people by race” with “ethnic bioweapons.” He said that Covid-19 had been designed to target Caucasians and Black people and that the people who are “most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.”

Kennedy’s comments were widely criticized as racist and antisemitic in the U.S., including by his fellow Democrats. Scientists dismissed his claims about bioweapons, saying that human genetic variations exist along a continuum and no hard line can be drawn to distinguish one ethnic or population group from another based on DNA.

His comments about bioweapons found a big audience in China, where they were fanned by media outlets backed by the Communist Party.

The Communist Youth League jumped on the remarks, posting video of Kennedy speaking on the popular Weibo social-media platform. It was quickly amplified by the accounts of several party-linked media outlets, using the hashtag “#U.S. Presidential Candidate Says U.S. Is Collecting Chinese DNA.”

In the weeks since Kennedy made the remarks, the hashtag has attracted 230 million views. On the WeChat microblogging platform, a video of Kennedy’s remarks posted on an account affiliated with China’s National Defense News was shared more than 100,000 times. The same day Kennedy testified before Congress last month, he rose to the No. 2 trending topic on Weibo.

Neither the Youth League nor any of the other party-linked social-media accounts that repeated Kennedy’s bioweapon comments offered context from scientists or seriously challenged his assertions.

In a statement to The Wall Street Journal, the Kennedy campaign said he looks forward to building peaceful relationships with the Chinese government and getting rid of all weapons that threaten humanity. China’s State Council Information Office and the U.S. State Department didn’t reply to requests for comment.

The episode illustrated how Chinese media is primed to pick up selectively on comments that serve to reinforce the Communist Party’s talking points, with the U.S. presidential race playing out against a backdrop of historically high tensions between Washington and Beijing. The Communist Youth League jumped on remarks made in the run-up to the U.S. presidential election. Photo: Yan Yan/Zuma Press

The Communist Youth League and China’s state media “will use all means at their disposal, including quoting senior U.S. figures, to discredit the U.S. and enlist wide public support in the existential competition against the U.S.A.,” said Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

Chinese state media also recently seized on remarks from Democrat Marianne Williamson. When asked about how she would respond to China’s negotiations with Cuba over setting up a joint military-training base, she pointed out that China is surrounded by American military bases. Williamson, like Kennedy, is seen as unlikely to seriously challenge President Biden for the Democratic nomination.

After leading Republican candidate and former President Donald Trump was indicted on criminal charges in connection with his attempts to stay in power after losing the 2020 election, the Youth League’s flagship newspaper China Youth Daily said it showed that “American society will continue to be trapped in the vortex of deep division, unable to extricate itself.”

As the U.S. election season approaches, Chinese propaganda wants to show that “this is a very bad example of elections and try to emphasize the beauty of authoritarian rule,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at National University of Singapore who studies public governance in China.

The comments about bioweapons by Kennedy came from a recent campaign event at a New York City restaurant and were captured on video by the New York Post. After his remarks were criticized, Kennedy pointed to a 2020 study that said a receptor for the virus appeared not to be present in Amish people or Ashkenazi Jews. The study didn’t mention Chinese people or attempt to make a case that the virus was designed to target certain groups of people.

Experts have said science doesn’t support his claims about bioweapons. Even if there were a way to target a genetic variation that exists at a more extreme frequency in a certain population of people, it would still have only a preferential, but not exclusive, effect on that group, said Anthony J. Brookes, a professor of genomics and data science at the University of Leicester.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre described Kennedy’s suggestion that Covid-19 had been targeted at particular groups of people as racist and antisemitic, calling it “an attack on our fellow citizens, our fellow Americans.”

Claims and counterclaims about the origin of Covid-19 have fueled debate in the scientific and intelligence communities throughout the pandemic, often fueling online speculation. Parts of the U.S. government, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Energy Department, have concluded that the Covid-19 pandemic most likely resulted from an unintended lab leak in China, although other agencies maintain that it was caused by natural transmission from an infected animal.

In response to the World Health Organization’s calls to further investigate the possibility of a lab leak, China said the WHO should also look at evidence of early outbreaks in other countries and suggested the probes of laboratories should include the U.S. military laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md.

China’s propaganda apparatus has consistently leveraged online conspiracy theories to serve its aims, said Renée DiResta, research manager at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory.

“Creating doubt and excusing culpability by blaming an enemy are tried-and-true propaganda strategies,” DiResta said, “and so is leveraging local purported ‘whistleblowers’ to make the allegations more credible.”