Sanjeev Sabhlok
In Part 2 I had started looking at the evidence for China’s use of cyber warfare in 2020.
A video circulated by @manisha_kataki on 12 March 2020 shows Chinese workers disinfecting streets: once again entirely doctored to create fear. There has never been such disinfection anywhere else in the world. Just this single India-based Twitter account clocked 17.4 million views for that video.
And there were innumerable hit-and-run accounts created by China during this period, such as @Ejiketion – that pumped out Chinese propaganda, then disappeared. And a lot of bullying, not just by bots. On 15 March 2020, Hu Xijin, Chinese official state media agency taunted Sweden, UK and Germany: “Sweden will not test people with mild symptoms. UK and Germany tried to build a ‘herd immunity’, which will expose many people to the risk of death. These countries are unwilling to invest more resources in epidemic control. What about human rights? What about humanitarianism?”
This is not the language of a nation interested in the welfare of the people but of a nation trying to get the West to go hysterical and commit suicide.
The New York Times has two articles on this topic: on 22 April 2020 (“Chinese Agents Helped Spread Messages That Sowed Virus Panic in U.S., Officials Say”) and on 6 June 2020 (“Behind China’s Twitter Campaign, a Murky Supporting Chorus”). From these we know that “Twitter is being manipulated to amplify pro-Beijing messages”, and that “Beijing’s Twitter brigade includes Hua Chunying, the head of [China’s] foreign ministry’s information department”.
This is war. Let no one tell us otherwise.
4. Hysterical “models” and compromised media
But there was more up Jinping’s sleeve. We know that the 1999 book exhorts China to sabotage the West from within through its “experts”.
Xi Jinping had visited the Imperial College in October 2015 during which “Professor Gast delivered a welcome speech highlighting Imperial’s role as ‘the premier partner for research collaborations with China’”.
In my book, The Great Hysteria and The Broken State I have discussed the role played by the 16 March 2020 paper by Neil Ferguson and 30 co-authors in stirring up extreme panic in the West. This paper is a product of the Imperial College in London. Intelligence agencies should investigate whether the paper’s authors have linkages with China. Have any of them visited China? What treatment did they receive?
But not just the “experts”. For years now, China has carefully cultivated journalists across the world. Intelligence agencies should find out whether the journalists who hyped up the Ferguson model have received favours from China or were merely “useful idiots”. This much we know, that the media has never asked why the West changed its strategy suddenly from “flattening the curve” to eradication through lockdowns. Why did the media not perform its fundamental role in 2020?
5. Carefully groomed politicians
It is well-known that China has groomed many Western bureaucrats and politicians. One of them is Daniel Andrews, the Premier of Victoria, who signed Jinping’s Belt and Road initiative. It has been reported in the media that “In March, the Premier met with China’s Melbourne consul general, Long Zhou. The consulate reported that Andrews praised China’s tremendous efforts to prevent and control the epidemic and its important contribution to global public health and security”.
6. Misdirection: The Wuhan laboratory “myth”
This last reason is probably not as well-substantiated as the earlier ones but if it is found to be true, it would fit with China’s war principles.
In 2013, Obama had banned “gain-of-function studies” which involve the man-made creation of new viruses. That it is possible to create such viruses was confirmed in a 2015 report in Nature Medicine about a hybrid (chimeric) virus produced by Ralph Baric of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill using a “reverse genetics system”. Baric’s study had been allowed to be completed since it had started before the Obama ban.
In 2015 Anthony Fauci approved a NIH-funded $3.7 million project to undertake bat coronavirus research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology. That is why many people have asked whether SARS-CoV2 was invented in the Wuhan lab.
The biggest proponent of this claim has been the “whistle-blower” LiMeng Yan of Hong Kong who published a paper in September 2020 to “prove” her theory. However, her paper has been trashed by scientists such as Gigi Kwik Gronvall, an immunologist at Johns Hopkins University who says the paper is “full of terms that are jumbled together to sound impressive but aren’t supported”. A 20 November 2020 article in the New York Times (“How Steve Bannon and a Chinese Billionaire Created a Right-Wing Coronavirus Media Sensation”) provides details to confirm that there is no proof of such claims.
This suggests to me that this “whistle-blower” might be fake, a Jinping plant to misdirect the attention of the West. Magic uses misdirection all the time. It would not be surprising if this concept has been used to transfer the attention of the world away from the more basic issue of lockdowns.
Everyone has been outplayed but Sweden
Jinping has not just outplayed the West (excluding Sweden), he has outclassed Modi and cramped the prospect of India taking China’s place in the future.
In March 2020 I had advised my IAS batchmate Rajiv Gauba, India’s Cabinet Secretary, against lockdowns. But India’s bureaucracy is no match for Jinping’s genius. India also recklessly ignored brilliant scientists like Jayaprakash Muliyil, Jay Bhattacharya and Sunetra Gupta and, instead, took China’s bait. India still remains half-hysterical. And Indian and Western intelligence agencies have been sleeping throughout, just like the media.
The 67-year old Xi Jinping is not a passing fad. He has been transforming China for seven years and has radically reshaped the world in 2020. He is undoubtedly the greatest strategist on Earth today. Unless someone with character and intelligence emerges from the West – or from India – and rather quickly, it is basically game over for liberty and the Western civilisation.
Politicians across the world have thoroughly enjoyed the power that lockdowns and mandatory mask policies have given them. They love public health – a gift that keeps giving. They will not return liberty to the people anytime soon. Instead, they will follow Jinping’s orders through his mouthpiece, the WHO (or the Imperial College or one of the many other “experts” across the West who owe their primary allegiance to China).
Whatever else we do, we must stop being hysterical. And intelligence agencies must establish teams to identify and expose China’s role. Once all the facts are established, the world needs to hold Jinping to account – although that will probably be easier said than done.
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