British homegrown conspiracies get Beijing’s stamp of approval
QAnon adherents and far-right anti-vaccine evangelists, in their ardent support of President Trump, used to lambast China. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has changed that. “The dynamics of the invasion are shifting their views. In an astoundingly short space of time, Xi Jinping appears to have been recast from a villain to a hero in the QAnon conspiracy pantheon,” analyst Elise Thomas wrote in a report for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue on Wednesday.
QAnon conspiracy theories both feed into and borrow from Chinese and Russian state narratives. The claim that the U.S. has bioweapons labs on Russia’s borders is a perfect example.
Indeed, any conspiracy theory dreamed up by disinformation influencers — QAnon or not — has the potential to get picked up by Chinese Communist Party-backed media, if it suits the state narrative. This week, a new symbiotic relationship has emerged between Chinese state media and a fringe British conspiracy website.
On Thursday, China Daily published an article in Mandarin falsely claiming that Covid was created by the pharmaceutical company Moderna. The Beijing-backed outlet screenshotted and republished a page from the British conspiracy website called The Exposé, which claimed “beyond a reasonable doubt” that the virus was created in a Moderna lab.