The United States accused China and Russia on Friday of "speeding up" cooperation on "propaganda" and "disinformation" with the new coronavirus, in a further escalation of the Sino-American Word War on the origin of the pandemic.
"Before the Covid-19 crisis, we had already seen some level of propaganda coordination between Russia and the People's Republic of China," said Lea Gabrielle, center coordinator for the US State Department responsible for '' analyze and counter foreign propaganda. "But with this pandemic, cooperation has accelerated quickly ," she added during a conference call with journalists. According to her, this "convergence is the result of the pragmatism of the two actors, who want to shape the interpretation of the Covid pandemic by opinion in their own interest".
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In late March, when US President Donald Trump and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping concluded an informal truce in the war of words between the two great powers on the origin of the disease, Washington was pleased to see China no longer propagate conspiracy theories on the internet about American involvement. But the truce quickly shattered.
"Dirty political game"
The Trump administration accuses the Chinese authorities of delaying alerting the world to the epidemic, and of concealing its magnitude. And therefore to be "responsible" for its global spread, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and the current unprecedented economic crisis.
Worse, the American president and his secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, now openly suspect Beijing of having hidden a laboratory accident which would have been at the origin of the pandemic. The head of the American diplomacy said he had "immense evidence" showing that the virus, of natural origin, came from a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, while admitting that he was not "certain" . But he did not reveal any of these elements, and this thesis, which has not been publicly confirmed by American intelligence, is therefore based at this stage only on these suspicions.
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Misinformation, replied Chinese diplomacy: Mike Pompeo "cannot present evidence", "because he has none". "Behind the mood" always blame China "hides a dirty political game, carried by a handful of people who divert attention out of political interest , " protested Chinese Ambassador to Washington Cui Tiankai in a column in the Washington Post . "In their manipulation, China must be wrong."
“Non-authentic” Twitter accounts
For his part, Russian President Vladimir Putin denounced Friday, in a phone call with Xi Jinping, "attempts by certain forces to use the epidemic as a pretext to accuse China" , according to the agency’s report China official press release. Russia "will firmly support China," he added.
However, the US State Department believes that Beijing has again intensified its "aggressive disinformation campaign" , to defend Chinese management of the epidemic and criticize the United States.
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Lea Gabrielle says Chinese authorities "are adapting in real time and are increasingly using techniques long used by Moscow", "to confuse and try to convince people that the Covid was not born in China " "We see that the Chinese Communist Party is adopting Russian tactics," because "it believes that it works," she insisted.
In question, these same "techniques" used, according to American intelligence, by Russia to interfere in the 2016 American presidential election to favor Donald Trump. The diplomat describes a greatly increased use by Beijing of "software to develop its theses on social networks", with a new "artificial" network of "non-authentic Twitter accounts created with the aim of amplifying Chinese propaganda and disinformation" .
The phenomenon had already been noted by Washington during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, but has since grown, she said.
"Many Twitter accounts of Chinese diplomats have registered a major increase in new subscribers since March," a trend that accelerated until May, said Lea Gabrielle. The number of new subscribers recently created rose, for these accounts of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, its spokesmen or embassies, from 30 per day on average previously to more than 720 per day, she detailed. , deeming the link with the Chinese Communist Party "highly probable".
