BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION RADIO 4 TRANSCRIPT OF “FILE ON 4” – “THE DISINFORMATION DRAGON” CURRENT AFFAIRS GROUP TRANSMISSION: Tuesday 9th March 2021 2000 - 2040 REPEAT: Sunday 14th March 2021 1700 - 1740 REPORTER: Paul Kenyon & Krassimira Twigg PRODUCER: Jim Booth EDITOR: Lucy Proctor PROGRAMME NUMBER: 20VQ6346LH0 - 1 - THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. “FILE ON 4” Transmission: Tuesday 9th March 2021 Repeat: Sunday 14th March 2021 Producer: Jim Booth Reporter: Paul Kenyon & Krassimira Twigg Editor: Lucy Proctor ___________________________________________________________________________ MUSIC EXTRACT FROM CGTN NEWS REPORT, 18/2/2021 MAN: Almost two years later after the shutdown of …, we are again here at Fort Detrick. KENYON: This is a news report suggesting that the coronavirus might originally have come, not from China, but from a military research base in Maryland, America. It was made by Chinese state television, and aimed at an international audience - you and me. MAN: It was here where five residents have died following an outbreak of respiratory illness that began in the summer of 2019. KENYON: The suspicions aired in the report are baseless. It is innuendo and misinformation dressed up as investigative journalism. And tonight, an insider from China’s state television tells us why it’s happening. - 2 - INSIDER: It’s China’s official news office, so it’s from the top that has definitely issued this. And it’s a whole nation strategy to kind of fight back, to make people think, you know, we are innocent. KENYON: In the last twelve months, Chinese state-sponsored misinformation has swept into millions of homes around the world. Chances are you’ll have seen it, but you won’t know where it originated. HOWARD: It’s generated by actors who we don’t even know if they’re actually connected to a state’s government spy agency. KENYON: Tonight, File on 4 reveals China’s new experiment in global disinformation that has even targeted Western Covid vaccines. CARVIN: With the emergence of Covid, China created a whole new information cocktail, a perfect storm of circumstances in which China suddenly realised that playing hardball was probably going to be the only way they could get through the crisis from their perspective. KENYON: Inside BBC Broadcasting House in the centre of London, is a department called BBC Monitoring. Its job is to assess and analyse media from around the world - from state-run television in Iran to Russian newspapers and Chinese social media. TWIGG: My name is Krassi Twigg. I work at BBC Monitoring. I studied in China, I speak the language, and I follow the country closely. KENYON: This time last year, Krassi and her colleagues noticed a step change in China’s approach to the global information war. TWIGG: What we saw was that China became a lot more assertive internationally. It really wanted to add its voice, its truth to the Covid narrative and shape perceptions of its role in the pandemic. And it didn’t shy away from throwing mud at others in order to mend its own image, and that was new. - 3 - KENYON: My name is Paul Kenyon, and I’ve reported from some of the world’s most authoritarian regimes. But I began my career before the internet was even invented - when propaganda was pushed through state-controlled newspapers, television and radio, and it was left to us, journalists, to try to separate truth from fiction. Now, there’s no filter. It’s down to each one of us to judge the veracity of what we read online. So, I’m joining forces with Krassi, who’s more adept at exploring the far-reaches of the internet; a universe of bots and diplomats called the wolf warriors, and something called the spamouflage dragon. EXTRACT FROM CHINESE TV KENYON: It is mid-January 2020. Chinese TV is about to make an announcement that will change the world. BBC Monitoring has just picked it up. TWIGG: It was state media acknowledging for the first time that a flu-like illness in Wuhan was caused by a new coronavirus. There was a lot of chatter on social media in the weeks before, with people wondering what was going on, but state media was very slow to report on it. The Chinese New Year was around the corner, it was supposed to be a happy, auspicious time - not a time to lock people inside their homes. KENYON: China’s instinct was to contain and control the news, to avoid panic and social unrest and to protect the reputation of the People’s Republic and its ruling Communist Party. China’s hardly unique of course - other governments play down bad news all the time - it is what we used to call spin. CARVIN: My name is Andy Carvin and I’m senior fellow and managing editor of the Digital Forensic Research Lab. We are a research centre at the Atlantic Council, which is a Washington, DC-based think tank. What’s interesting is that, until recently, China tended to focus on what is often referred to as discourse power. They would use their many platforms, both domestically and internationally, to emphasise their soft power - how they were helpful to the world and how they were putting their best foot forward. MUSIC - 4 - TWIGG: In those first few days, China’s approach was to play up its courage and commitment in dealing with the crisis, not to play down others. In fact, spreading fake news on coronavirus was actually an arrestable offence. KENYON: Then, on January 26th last year, a man from Inner Mongolia put a message on social media. With no evidence at all, he suggested the coronavirus had not emerged naturally, but was a bio-weapon, engineered by the United States. CARVIN: It’s not unusual for people to gossip among themselves, but when those same types of conversations take place online, there’s always the possibility that they can escalate very quickly, because one person’s rumour or speculation becomes a potential source of another person, which can then become an actual claim of fact, even though there’s no basis in fact on that. TWIGG: The originator of this particular story was arrested by the Chinese authorities and jailed for spreading false rumours. Then, as the UK recorded its first two cases of Covid-19 on the 31st January 2020, some powerful voices in America began tweeting that the virus might have leaked from a Chinese biolab in Wuhan EXTRACT FROM SPEECH BY PRESIDENT TRUMP TRUMP: It comes from China …. TWIGG: It wasn’t long before the White House went on the offensive. TRUMP: Covid-19. That name gets further and further away from China as opposed to calling it the Chinese virus … Kung Flu … KENYON: Conspiracy websites lit up across the United States. The InfoWars host, Alex Jones, said the virus was designed by China to destabilise Trump. Others began pointing to the 5G network that was sourced from China, blaming it for somehow spreading the virus. - 5 - TWIGG: Back in Beijing, China changed tack. An elaborate, anti-US rumour emerged and this time the Chinese Government allowed it to spread. It was centred on an event that took place in October 2019 - before anyone had even heard of coronavirus - when athletes from around the world had gathered in Wuhan for something called the Military World Games. CGTN CLIP OF THE MILITARY WORLD GAMES ANNOUNCER: Please stand for the flag and anthem of the International Military Sports Council [MUSIC]. CARVIN: This is essentially a sporting competition that involves the world’s militaries. TWIGG: Andy Carvin again. CARVIN: And there were representatives from many countries, including the United States. And so, as people began grasping at straws to figure out how Wuhan, of all places, might have been the point of origin for coronavirus, the Military World Games became a convenient opportunity to point at a specific instance when there would have been US armed forces representation appearing in Wuhan itself. MUSIC KENYON: The American delegation - or so the theory went - might have carried the virus with them, making them super-spreaders. The state-controlled People’s Daily picked up the story. From there, it slipped into foreign media. The Helsinki Times and the New Zealand Herald carried inserts from the People’s Daily that repeated the claim. Part of the reason it had spread from social media to the mainstream press was an army of keyboard warriors in China, whose job it is to amplify Beijing-friendly rhetoric. Kerry Allen, BBC Monitoring’s China expert, has been watching them for years. - 6 - ALLEN: There was what are known as the Wu Mao or 50 Cent Brigade, who were these social media users that are paid by China to write comments on social media in line with Government rhetoric. KENYON: The 50 Cent Brigade used to target domestic audiences, tweeting in Chinese. But Kerry noticed a change as far back as June 2019, before coronavirus, with an aggressive social media campaign against the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. They were now tweeting in English, directing their comments at a Western audience, just like the Russian so-called bot-farms that we are all so familiar with. If you’d have seen these posts, you’d have thought they were just Chinese patriots, rather than Government-backed agents, but Kerry has learned to read the clues. ALLEN: So, one of the things that I often see is very serious and very overly formal language.