On Thursday, a prominent Chinese diplomat tweeted a false conspiracy theory that the novel coronavirus did not originate in Wuhan, China, but in the United States.

“This article is very much important to each and every one of us. Please read and retweet it. COVID-19: Further Evidence that the Virus Originated in the US,” Lijian Zhao, the deputy director-general of the Information Department of China's Foreign Ministry, tweeted. In a follow-up tweet, the diplomat wrote, “Just take a few minutes to read one more article. This is so astonishing that it changed many things I used to believe in. Please retweet to let more people know about it.”

The tweet linked to a story on conspiracy theory site Global Research that falsely claimed the novel coronavirus originated in the US. Experts at the World Health Organization have concluded the disease first appeared in the Chinese province of Hubei. As of Friday, the disease has infected 137,860 people and killed 5,074 around the world.

The false claim was far from the only piece of propaganda that Zhao, the most prominent member of China's Foreign Ministry on Twitter, has pushed about the coronavirus outbreak in the last week — a strategy that didn't convince anyone, but appears designed to polarize the US government and disrupt any bipartisan mitigation efforts.

Zhao and Hua Chunying, another spokesperson for China’s Foreign Ministry, have flooded Twitter with posts lauding the Chinese Communist Party's response to COVID-19 and indulging in conspiracy theories about the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Unlike other parts of China’s propaganda apparatus, which are typically concerned with manipulating homegrown social networks like Weibo and WeChat, Zhao, Hua, and a small group of other diplomats have become more and more brazen about taking their information war to American platforms.

Following Zhao and Hua’s tweet, the State Department summoned the Chinese Ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai on Friday. The Chinese embassy did not respond to a request for comment. President Donald Trump, in a coronavirus press conference Friday, was asked about Zhao's propaganda efforts. Trump waved them away, saying they wouldn't impact trade with China.

"They know where [the virus] came from, we all know where it came from," he said.



Del Harvey, Twitter's vice president of trust and safety, said the platform is assessing things "case by case" and that government officials don't have special rights to post harmful information, but the platform is also taking into account if the replies to tweets are providing "corrective" information.



Zhao, who currently has 284,000 followers on Twitter, first went viral in the US last July. He did so again last November after he fired off an eight-part tweetstorm about American racism and mocked Trump.

“This is a time for Chinese diplomats to tell the true picture,” he told BuzzFeed News in December.