For some time, I have suspected that China was behind the lockdowns in Western nations.

An American attorney and researcher, Michael P Senger, has been researching this topic for months.

On September 15, he reported his findings for Tablet: ‘China’s Global Lockdown Propaganda Campaign’. Please circulate the link amongst your family and friends.

Excerpts follow, emphases mine.

China’s lockdown in mid-January, Senger says, was in accordance with their national policy of fangkong:

By the end of the month, Dr Tedros from the WHO praised China for its successful lockdown:

Yet only six days in, the lockdown—“unprecedented in public health history”—had produced no results, so Tedros was praising human rights abuses with nothing to show for them.

Then came the video clips on social media which went viral:

One video purportedly showed a SWAT team catching a man with a butterfly net for removing his mask. But in hindsight, this crisis theater is somewhat comical; in the infamous video, the “spontaneously collapsing” man extends his arms to catch himself.

The Chinese government also issued images showing they were on top of the coronavirus situation:

Official Chinese accounts widely shared an image of a hospital wing supposedly constructed in one day, but which actually showed an apartment 600 miles away.

Remember how China’s cases started declining in February?

Beginning in February, the CCP reported an exponential decline in coronavirus cases, until March 19 when they announced their lockdown had eliminated domestic cases entirely.

After that, there were no more Chinese data forthcoming.

Why anyone thought the Chinese were being truthful is astounding:

The CCP has shaped scientific narratives by consistently promoting the falsehood that “China controlled the virus.” Of course, “China controlled the virus” is a baldfaced lie. China expelled journalists in March and its infection data is manifestly forged; U.S. intelligence has confirmed China’s data is intentionally misrepresented.

Yet, from this, came the push for lockdowns worldwide — along with a campaign against hydroxychloroquine, which, if used early enough and combined with azithromycin or zinc, can alleviate the debilitating symptoms of the virus.

Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet, even gave an interview to China Central Television:

The “century of humiliation,” when China was dominated by a colonially-minded west and Japan, only came to an end with the Communist victory in the civil war in 1949 … Every contemporary Chinese leader, including Xi Jinping, has seen their task as protecting the territorial security won by Mao and the economic security achieved by Deng.

Good grief. That explains a lot.

The WHO, not surprisingly, led the way for lockdowns, praising, in their words, the:

uncompromising and rigorous use of non-pharmaceutical measures to contain transmission of the COVID-19 virus in multiple settings

which, the organisation said:

provides vital lessons for the global response.

The New York Times, which, nearly a century ago, praised the Stalin regime, jumped on board the Chinese bandwagon:

China ‘took one of the most ancient strategies and rolled out one of the most ambitious, agile and aggressive disease-containment efforts in history.’

China was ready to promote lockdown via bogus social media accounts:

Within China, the CCP has long paid hundreds of thousands of social media propagandists and also pays for posts on an a la carte basis, totaling hundreds of millions of propaganda comments each year. More recently, these activities have gone global and escalated dramatically during the coronavirus pandemic. Social media companies have proven somewhat unserious about the gravity of the problem. When the State Department provided a sample of 250,000 accounts likely involved in coronavirus disinformation, Twitter refused to take action. These activities affect countries with little say in social media governance; a recent study found thousands of inauthentic accounts still promoting Serbian-Chinese friendship after Twitter deleted thousands of others. A former Facebook employee wrote “I have blood on my hands” due to the company’s routinely discounting malicious political activity despite its “disproportionate impact.”

It should not come as a surprise that Italy was the first European nation to implement lockdown. The country has been a part of China’s expansive Belt and Road Initiative. Many Chinese work in the north making luxury goods, brand names we all know.

The Chinese travelled to Italy to advise:

Chinese experts arrived in Italy on March 12 and two days later advised a tighter lockdown: “There are still too many people and behaviors on the street to improve.” On March 19, they repeated that Italy’s lockdown was “not strict enough,” saying: “Here in Milan, the hardest hit area by COVID-19, there isn’t a very strict lockdown … We need every citizen to be involved in the fight of COVID-19 and follow this policy.”

During that time, China ran a social media propaganda campaign in Italy:

From March 11 to 23, roughly 46% of tweets with the hashtag #forzaCinaeItalia (Go China, go Italy) and 37% of those with the hashtag #grazieCina (thank you China) came from bots.

However, these were not automated bots, as Senger explains. They were fake accounts that were carefully managed:

Social media and analytics companies generally only detect obvious automated activity, while fake, personally managed accounts can be created with ease. This works out well for the CCP, which has always preferred the human touch.

He cites one account which was all about promoting lockdown until George Floyd’s death, at which point the account switched to promoting BLM:

On March 12, Twitter user @manisha_kataki posted a video showing Chinese workers disinfecting streets, apparently admiring China’s strategy: “At this rate, China will be back in action very soon, may be much faster than the world expects.” As The New York Times’ Paul Mozur noted, this tweet was not shocking, funny, or newsworthy, yet it was shared hundreds of thousands of times. This caught the attention of Israeli company Next Dim, which flagged the activity as likely state-sponsored.

Senger has a collage of the user’s tweets, which insulted countries that had not yet adopted lockdown.

That was not the only Twitter account. There were others, which, interestingly, also tweeted about racial division.

Hence, it was a natural progression to go from promoting lockdown to BLM:

Many of these same accounts also frequently discuss racial divisions. Later in 2020, they show strong support for Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests, especially those surrounding the death of George Floyd. Racial justice is an issue of real concern to many citizens, both in America and throughout the world. But knowing that the CCP supported these protests, it’s worth pondering the likelihood that the frugal Xi would not be spending billions of dollars per year on foreign propaganda—and stepping up those activities—if he weren’t seeing results.

Although the aforementioned New York Times article by Paul Mozur caught the attention of Twitter, which suspended 170,000 accounts, Senger says that:

many of the suspect accounts are still active, and a search for hundreds of similar examples can be easily repeated with one click.

State and national leaders who were late to lock down, never did lock down or lifted their restrictions came under China’s Twitter fire via these accounts:

When South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem famously refused to issue a statewide lockdown, suspicious accounts began filling her Twitter feed with abuse and graphic language to pressure her to do so.

Kristi Noem stood her ground and never locked down South Dakota.

Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp was the first to lift a state lockdown. When Kemp honoured the late Rep John Lewis, he received a barrage of abuse on Twitter:

conspicuous, vulgar language that often invoked his anti-lockdown stance.

Senger alleges that Boris Johnson was a target of Chinese propaganda which ended up with him locking down the UK:

Initially, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson also opted for herd immunity. But on March 13, suspicious accounts began storming his Twitter feed and likening his plan to genocide. This language almost never appears in Johnson’s feed before March 12, and several of the accounts were hardly active before then. Britain locked down on March 23.

I have wondered why Sweden took the wise decision not to implement a lockdown. It turns out there is a disagreement between Sweden and China:

Sweden’s skepticism toward the CCP predates COVID-19. In January, Beijing threatened Swedish trade ties over an award given to Gui Congyou, a Swedish publisher detained in China. Sweden did not back down and later refused to follow China’s lockdown model, opting for a herd immunity strategy. Thus, Sweden became a prime target of a Chinese campaign portraying it as weak against the COVID threat.

The account names and trending hashtags fit with the targeted nations to sound plausible. Italy had the aforementioned #forzaCinaeItalia. The United States had @AmerLiberal as one of the CCP-sponsored accounts:

@AmerLiberal, appears to be a model CCP propaganda account, showing strong support for China’s human rights abuses—including in Xinjiang and Hong Kong—and antipathy for China’s key rivals, India and the United States. The account strongly supports global lockdowns.

Conservative Americans have known for some time China has been funding certain US research programmes:

For decades, the CCP has co-opted scientists through its unparalleled overseas influence network, the United Front Work Department, which expanded dramatically under Xi. In June, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced that 189 of its grantees had received undisclosed funding from foreign governments. In 93% of cases, including that of Charles Lieber, chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, the undisclosed funding came from China. Likewise, the National Science Foundation, a smaller organization, reported 16–20 cases of undisclosed foreign financial ties; all but two were with China.

Michael P Senger has a Twitter feed, which is also worth reading.

On the ties to China and related propaganda, here are tweets from an informative thread of his:

I had not seen that video until today. That said, in April or May, the BBC News channel ran regular reports from China around dinnertime in the UK. One young couple interviewed said, whilst smiling, that the lockdown, which had ended by then, showed that the Chinese government cared about its people and that the restrictions were for ‘health’ and the common good. Of course!

Here is a collage of CCP-sponsored tweets:

Many countries have them, including France.

Some might wonder about the severe lockdown in Victoria State, Australia, best known for the city of Melbourne. This tweet has a collage of Australian tweets thanking Victoria’s governor, Dan Andrews. Senger’s text reads:

Andrews’ long-time staffer attended a high-level CCP academy. An MP leading Andrews’ Belt & Road negotiations with Beijing lauded China’s handling of COVID.

That explains a lot, too.

Bill Gates also approves of strict lockdowns that violate civil liberties (see second tweet):

Oh. My. Word.

I rather liked this short exchange after the thread:

That means us.

So, please be sociable and circulate Michael P Senger’s links and tweets. Thank you.