Inside China’s campaign to blame the U.S. for the coronavirus pandemic

As coronavirus cases dwindle in China, and explode across the rest of the world, Beijing is undertaking a campaign to shift blame for the emergence of the disease to a familiar foe — the United States.

The seemingly coordinated effort to, at minimum, sow doubts about the virus’s origin, and, at its most extreme, to directly accuse the U.S. military of creating and spreading the pathogen, has come from Chinese medical leaders, ambassadors and Foreign Ministry spokespersons — not to mention the hundreds of thousands of comments on Chinese social media echoing the conspiracy theories.