Thank you for downloading assignment from the BBC World Service.

This edition takes us on a journey through cyberspace

where China is using new tactics to try to control the world's narrative

on the coronavirus pandemic. You'll discover a world of

bots, diplomats known as the wolf warriors and something called the Spamouflage Dragon.

I hope you find it interesting.

Almost two years later after the shutdown of Army Lab we are again here at Fort Dedrick. 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.

It was here where five residents have died, holding an outbreak of respiratory

illness that began in the summer 2019. The suspicions aired in the report are baseless. It's innuendo and

misinformation dressed up as investigative journalism. And tonight an insider from

China's state television tells us why it's happening.

It's China's official news office, so it's from the talk that has definitely issued this.

And it's a whole nation's strategy to kind of fight back to make people think, you know, we are innocent.

In the last 12 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.

It's generated by actors that we don't even know if they're actually connected to a state's government spy agency.

I'm Paul and I'm Krasi and this edition of Assignment on BBC World Service reveals China's new experiment in global

disinformation that has even targeted Western COVID vaccines.

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