The vast majority of pro-Russian disinformation content on the war in Ukraine does not come from Russia… but from China! This is confirmed by a study published on May 4 by NewsGuard, an organization fighting against online propaganda. Because if Facebook is banned in China, the Chinese media do not deprive themselves of Facebook: more than half a billion users of this network follow public media affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.
For example, Newsguard tells us, “the French-speaking Facebook page of the Chinese public television channel CGTN has 20 million followers”. It is with this enormous leverage, no doubt undervalued in the West, that China relays many conspiracy theories. And for Antoine Bondaz, researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research, specialist in China and guest of this episode, Beijing does not support the theses of the Kremlin by ideological alignment with Ukraine, but to achieve through this propaganda an objective of its own: harm the United States.
The strategy was the same at the time of the Covid: to use all possible means to reach his sworn enemy, for example by strongly pushing the idea that the Covid-19 did not originate in China, but in the United States, more precisely from an American laboratory. Larry Romanoff, an alleged Canadian scientist, served to legitimize China’s discourse on an American origin of Covid. But the power itself assumes its “informational” campaigns: on March 24, 2020, the Chinese embassy in France published a series of tweets questioning the origin of Covid-19, wondering if the United States had not not attempt to cover up cases in September 2019, before the Wuhan episode, or by explaining that suspicious cases had appeared in the United States just after the closure of “a major American biochemical weapons research center”.
Already in 1989, during the Tiananmen massacre, the official Chinese discourse on the “Beijing Spring” hardly differs from that of Thierry Meyssan’s highly conspiratorial Voltaire Network: “The Tiananmen Uprising was the CIA’s first attempt to stage a ‘color revolution'”. A color revolution, that is to say a movement which would not come from the people, but from a manipulation coming from abroad to destabilize the power in place.
Even today, any dissident can be accused of being piloted from outside, for example in Hong Kong.
Another target subject of conspiracy: the fate of the Uyghurs, about which relays of the French conspiracy carry the speech of Beijing.
“In China, uninhibited conspiracy”, this is the 29th episode of Complorama with Rudy Reichstadt, director of Conspiracy Watch, and Tristan Mendès France, lecturer and member of the observatory of conspiracy, specialist in digital cultures. A podcast to be found on the franceinfo site, the Radio France application and several other platforms like Apple podcasts, Podcast Addict, Spotify, or Deezer.