Unpacking China's viral propaganda war

Chinese websites are carrying numerous videos detailing what one of them, by something calling itself “Sharp Arrow Military News,” calls “America’s ugly truth,” slickly produced and professionally narrated, listing various supposedly incriminating facts about American behavior and spinning them into a tale of a dark anti-China plot — that, for example, as late as February, President Trump seemed unconcerned about the spread of the virus to the United States.

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One making the rounds recently provides one of the more elaborate presentations of the theory to date. It’s not entirely clear who created it, or how broadly it is circulating in China or how great its influence is. A brief, unscientific survey of people inside China, mostly well-educated middle-class city dwellers, turned up nobody who actually believed its claims.

But the video is professionally done, with a Chinese-language narrator speaking very much the style and intonation of official Chinese news broadcasts. It has the look and format of other videos that have been put out by a Chinese army propaganda unit in Wuhan, though it could not be confirmed whether this new video was produced in this way or not.

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