As the world grapples with the coronavirus crisis, China's diplomats are waging an online information war. | Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images Chinese diplomacy ramps up social media offensive in COVID-19 info war Beijing-linked diplomats have multiplied social media output four-fold since April 2019 as they seek to counter Western narratives, analysts say.

Beijing's consul general in Kolkata, India promoted a social media post from RT, the Russian-backed media outlet, that blamed the United States for the pandemic. A Chinese diplomat in The Netherlands went on social media to accuse U.S. officials of spreading misinformation about the public health crisis.

China's ambassador to France Lu Shaye Wednesday criticized the French media for an alleged lack of independence in a series of tweets. "They're always following the American media," he said.

As the world grapples with the coronavirus crisis, China's diplomats are waging an online information war.

A POLITICO review of social media messages by more than 100 Chinese officials showed a sizable increase in the number of posts since the COVID-19 crisis began in early 2020. Alongside more mundane content, some of Beijing's diplomats have promoted content harshly critical of both United States and the European Union, dismissed criticism of how China handled the global outbreak and amplified skewed content from Russian state-backed outlets with track records of widespread misinformation.

The ramped-up activity coincides with warnings from Western diplomats and misinformation experts that Beijing has changed its online tactics in the wake of last year's Hong Kong pro-democracy protests. Increasingly, China has become more aggressive in promoting itself on Western social media, tapping into existing populist sentiment online that is already undermining trust in democratic systems among U.S. and EU voters.

The online push comes as the global response to the coronavirus pandemic becomes a political tug-of-war, with state-backed actors including those from China and Russia flexing their muscles to promote messaging to audiences at home and abroad. In the latest example of diplomatic pressure, Chinese officials successfully leaned on the EU last week to water down its criticism of Beijing's disinformation tactics linked to COVID-19.

“If Russia is a tropical storm, then China is climate change.” — Jānis Sārts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence

"As soon as the coronavirus jumped out of China, the narratives shifted to play up the benevolence of China," said Bret Schafer, a media and digital disinformation fellow at the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy. "And when Donald Trump started aggressively pushing against China's response, they started to change again to point the fingers at the United States."

A spokesman for China's mission to the EU did not return a request for comment on how the country' communication strategy has changed during the ongoing public health crisis that has left almost 220,000 people dead worldwide.

'Enormous capabilities'

Beijing's social media push comes amid a groundswell of half-truths, rumors and outright lies about the coronavirus.

Western politicians, including President U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, have sowed doubt by promoting dubious or false theories about who created the virus and how it can be treated. People from Berlin to Boston have also taken to social media to spout bogus claims to others in search of answers.

To analyze China's social media strategy, Schafer and Kristine Berzina, a senior fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, reviewed the activity of more than 135 official Chinese diplomatic Twitter accounts. The number of posts, collectively, has risen roughly four-fold since April 2019, when the political unrest in Hong Kong took off, according to their analysis.

That marks a stark change.

In December, just as the world was beginning to wake up to the coronavirus threat, the Chinese Twitter accounts, which at the time totaled around 100, were collectively publishing up to 4,000 posts on the social media network each month. Now, the combined monthly number has more than quadrupled to 17,000 tweets, although that figure also includes an influx of new Chinese diplomat accounts since January.

Beijing's "use of Twitter feels experimental," said Berzina in reference to China's evolving social media activities. "The strategy on Twitter could quickly change."

As would be expected from an authoritarian state, many Chinese diplomats on social media (as well as government accounts linked to state media outlets and other agencies) promote content hailing Beijing's achievements, including the country's support for other nations in responding to the current public health crisis.

But others are significantly more aggressive, according to a review conducted by the Alliance for Securing Democracy and POLITICO's own independent analysis.

In Paris, where the country's official embassy account has more than 15,000 followers, one post promoted content from a U.S. fringe website that attacked claims from some U.S. officials that the virus escaped from a Chinese laboratory.

Last month, the same Paris-based account retweeted accusations, also made on Twitter, by Zhao Lijian, a senior official in China's ministry of foreign affairs, that the U.S. military may have brought the virus to China. "When did patient zero start in the United States?," the account wrote in a post that garnered six retweets. "The U.S. owes us an explanation!"

"The Paris embassy is aggressive with its own tweets," said Schafer. "They're willing to defend themselves online."

Lu Shaye, the Chinese ambassador to Paris, acknowledged a change in communications strategy in an interview with French newspaper L'Opinion.

"Chinese diplomats respond more and more to baseless affirmations from the Western media," he said. "Because in the past China didn't respond to this kind of attacks, today some are surprised to see it react," he added.

Latching onto content

Chinese officials have relayed rumors, conspiracy theories and misinformation spread by state-backed media from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. So far, this strategy is more ad hoc, left to individual accounts, than a coordinated campaign directed from Beijing, according to a review of these posts by POLITICO.

In Caracas, Li Baorong, the country's ambassador to Venezuela, shared several posts from Telesur, the local state media outlet, criticizing how the U.S. and European countries had handled the crisis. In Karachi, China's consul general for Pakistan retweeted a report from RT, allegedly showing German police manhandling people who broke the country's lockdown rules.

Several official Chinese embassy Twitter accounts — from Italy and Spain to the U.S. and Hungary — also shared online posts by Maffick Media, a viral video and news outlet funded by Russia.

While the sharing of such content did not necessarily mean Chinese officials endorsed such anti-West coverage (many of the Twitter accounts also posted material from more established media outlets), it highlighted how Beijing could be willing to latch onto narratives from countries associated with coordinated disinformation campaigns as part of their wider messaging around COVID-19.

"Many countries have a national interest in blaming the U.S.," said Ben Nimmo, director of investigations at Graphika, the social media analysis firm who has traced state-backed disinformation campaigns across social media.

More is likely to follow, according to Western officials and misinformation experts.

So far, China's online activities have been less sophisticated than those of Russia, particularly on Western social media sites where officials have less of a footprint than the country's domestic alternatives like Tencent's WeChat.

Yet in Canada's national election last October, mistruths about Justin Trudeau, the country's prime minister, were shared widely on WeChat within Canada's Mandarin-speaking diaspora, most likely with the support of Beijing, according to Taylor Owen, a professor at McGill University who followed the digital campaign.

Similar tactics are now starting to find their way onto Twitter and Facebook, and Western misinformation experts warn that where Russia first led, China will likely follow in the online disinformation arms race.

“If Russia is a tropical storm, then China is climate change,” said Jānis Sārts, director of the NATO Strategic Communications Center of Excellence, a NATO-affiliated group, that tracks government-backed disinformation campaigns. “They have the technology that Russia just doesn’t have. Their capabilities are enormous."

Laurens Cerulus contributed reporting.

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