How Tech & Media Launder Lies for China

Truth getting censored is bad. But lies that don't are worse.

For most of the past two years the government of China has reported that precisely 4,638 people in the country have died from Covid-19. After an initial dump of data on Covid-related deaths, the CCP has claimed that, in more than 18 months, four more people died. The numbers are so paltry that a recent update by the CCP claiming two—yes, two—additional deaths made global headlines.

This, of course, defies rational belief. In a country of 1.4 billion people, this translates to a mortality rate so tiny we can’t meaningfully express it in words. Or we can: it’s a lie, plain and simple.

The problem, however, is that when Twitter allows users to freely state that “only 4,638 Chinese people have died from Covid” without flagging the content, the platform is essentially laundering the lie. The same is true of media outlets that bluntly parrot the claim. Once it hits western news outlets, the lie is re-packaged for general use.

We have long known that China obscures data on everything from manufacturing growth to what’s really happening to its Uighur population. And while the CCP is certainly very concerned about controlling public perception regarding its economy and alleged crimes against humanity, there is one thing that scares the Party more than anything: Covid.

Early in the pandemic, the Chinese government was sent into a panic with the realization that if the world believed the pandemic had originated in one of its labs, this belief would empower China hawks, particularly in the US, who would use it as leverage to advance their agenda of “decoupling” the American economy from China. (And on that score, they were probably correct.) At stake was the entire premise of the Chinese manufacturing economy.

In response, the image that had to be project was one of supreme confidence. “We got this,” the Chinese government wanted the world to know. The impression they had to give off was that China, because of its national culture and, more than anything, its top-down government structure, was better able to handle the pandemic than any country in the world.

The message was clear: a pandemic rampaging through a country of 1.4 billion people presented a challenge that China would delight in conquering. And the western media played ball, with the New York Times going so far as to celebrate the Chinese victory over Covid-19 in August of 2020.

In spreading this message of China’s Truly Admirable Great and Total Success, the media repeated the central lie at the heart of what might the greatest disinformation campaign of the Covid era: that virtually no one died from Covid-19 in China. Check out these two paragraphs from a recent NBC News report on China’s two recently reported Covid deaths:

China has continued to impose a successful, if burdensome “zero-Covid” strategy since the initial outbreak in Wuhan. The strategy focuses on mass testing and strict lockdowns with residents banned from leaving their homes until all new cases are either found in quarantine or through contact tracing.

In practice, it meant the country has seen relatively few infections from the virus because clusters are tamped down as quickly as they’re discovered. The strategy has received popular support and prevented the large numbers of deaths seen in other countries, many of which have started to forgo any kind of social distancing measures.

Big Tech played its role too, never once flagging the 4,638 (until recently 4,636) falsehood as blatant CCP propaganda. And of course, the global health establishment, including the WHO and the epidemiology community never officially or meaningfully challenged the “alternative facts” used to construct this false narrative. China never had to own up to the real death toll because no one—but no one—pressured it to do so.

What’s notable about successful propaganda deployed on an international scale is that its foreign compliance that drives its success. When the Nazis launched Operation Himmler to make it seem as if Polish guerilla fighters had invaded Germany, it was the New York Times’ publication of the claim in its lead story on the day hostilities broke out in Europe, triggering World War II, that made the propaganda useful.

We’re witnessing today a highly intentional campaign of government propaganda being deployed by an authoritarian government. And, with a seal of approval by media and tech, the propaganda is succeeding—scratch that, it’s already succeeded.

China has glossed over its gross failures in handling the pandemic, which are marked by spectacular incompetence, including the failure to detect and report that a novel pathogen with pandemic potential was galloping through the country weeks before Chinese New Year celebrations.

It’s hard to imagine a greater failure, especially since we’ve all been convinced it was such a great success.