Chuck Ross of the Washington Free Beacon reports on the latest evidence of Chinese efforts to spin the COVID-19 story.
The Chinese Communist Party’s propaganda machine recently tapped a prominent historically black university with ties to Vice President Kamala Harris to spin Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
The China-U.S. Exchange Foundation, a think tank in the Chinese government’s foreign influence network, sponsored a report from students at Morgan State University that analyzed China and America’s handling of the pandemic, according to Justice Department filings. The report is filled with analysis that treats the Chinese and American responses to coronavirus as equal, ignoring growing evidence that Beijing has lied about the virus leaking from a lab in Wuhan.
The 97-page report credits the Chinese Communist Party’s centralized political system with allowing the quick dissemination of foreign aid, in contrast to America’s system which “[weakened] the stability of public health aid.” It says the Wuhan lab theory is a “long-lasting anti-China narrative hyped by some think tanks, media, and online communities in the U.S.” The report asserts that former president Donald Trump “ruined” the reputation of the United States and laments that rhetoric about the virus has caused anti-Asian bias.
Morgan State, located just an hour from the nation’s capital in Baltimore, Maryland, is led by David Wilson, who last month accompanied Vice President Kamala Harris on her trip to Ghana. Wilson met with National Security adviser Jake Sullivan to discuss national security issues in February. The report was released late last year, but details of how it came together were disclosed in foreign agent filings with the Justice Department last week.
The collaboration between the China-U.S. Exchange Foundation and Morgan State, which as a leading HBCU is the recipient of massive amounts of taxpayer funds, is a major cause for concern, according to one China watcher.
