East vs. West Infowars
How the lab leak debate became a proxy war about China
If there is one truth in the lab leak debate, it has little to do with labs; it is about China as a Rorschach test. This is not a biological search for the origins of Covid. It is a political debate. People see what they want to see, and that’s a big, mysterious country.
Lab leakers are more likely to call for a regime change in Beijing than an audit of Ralph Baric’s UNC lab. A university professor will tell his followers to read Das Kapital, while labeling anyone who disagrees a “Wumao Warrior.” They claim a Chinese Communist Party cover-up, cry for more democracy, but have no idea where either came from.
The CCP’s roots lie in the “rice theory of culture.” The intense labor and cooperative irrigation required for rice farming fostered more collectivist communities (e.g., communism) than the independent nature of wheat farming (e.g., democracy).
People look at a map, see a giant country, but have no idea what’s inside it. Two of the first four chapters of my book deal with the China question:
China is full of more myths than facts. Christianity is the fastest-growing religion there, and its GDP per capita is closer to Mexico’s than that of a world power. However, its sizable private sector has been pulling millions out of poverty. Today, the US share of world output stands at 15%, compared with 19% for China, and the US share of the world population is a mere 4%, compared with 18% for China. China’s share of global output is likely to peak at around 20% over the coming decade and then decline as its population declines.
The low fertility trap has caught the enormous country, which could harm its economy and political stability. For the past four decades, China has avoided military conflicts. The Taiwan issue has a long military history. During World War II, Taiwan served as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the Japanese to bomb China. Strategic ambiguity keeps the peace, as Chinese culture has not invaded Macau or Hong Kong for hundreds of years. But like most proud nations, it has a discriminatory past.
Mainstream media, along with lab leakers, shed tears for the Uyghur population, but have no idea why:
Most accusations of Uyghur genocide come from one source: Adrian Zenz, a born-again Christian anthropologist. The forced sterilization accusations relate to China’s one-child policy and modern birth control. Over the decades, the Uyghur population has tripled. The Uyghurs are part of a religious separatist movement in an oil-rich area with more smoke than fire. Think of a regular prison plus Guantanamo Bay. If forced labor existed in the Xinjiang region, it would involve Western environmental subsidies.
Contrary to Western perceptions, the Chinese government is not a unified entity. Like any vast bureaucracy, it’s rife with regional factions in which politicians have shaped the narrative around the lab leak since its inception. The CCP, akin to all communist regimes, will dissolve on its terms, much like the peaceful implosion of the USSR. A demise driven by Western cultural influences like denim and rock ‘n roll—an influence so threatening that the CCP banned TikTok for fear of its impact. TikTok’s roots were in an American teenage karaoke app called Musically. Meanwhile, Western scientists appear more committed to the workers’ revolution.
Other competitive issues present a complex situation. Jobs exported to China are individual pain but collective gain. It’s called “comparative advantage” and allows you to buy products cheaper. Instead of making the product on the shop floor, you now sell it on the sales floor, improving your standard of living. This is what Adam Smith, in 1776, called the division of labor. This biological concept will come up later.
China is the world’s #1 oil and food importer and the most globalization-dependent country. Per capita, China has less arable land than Saudi Arabia. Food security is national security in China, given its sensitive history.
China has an obsession with pork and a strategic pork reserve like the US oil reserve. The numbers are a state secret. A reserve’s point is psychological. It reassures people their supplies are ample. Because of African swine fever, China experienced a 1% decline in its 2019 GDP. Don’t laugh because the US government had a raisin reserve, and Canada still has a maple syrup reserve.
The US government also treats pig welfare as a national security issue. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Iowa has the world’s largest animal facility, full of deer and pigs. The European Union is the second largest pork producer behind China. It has an obscure program using a $10 million grant to research self-spreading pig vaccines.
To admit that Covid was an animal vaccine, an unintended consequence of good intentions, an East–West scientific collaboration, would strip the virtue signalling that now sustains many of its loudest participants.
It’s also not considered a bioweapon because Covid has a survival rate of 99.9%. A study in February 2001 identified 21 known germ attacks over the decades, with most stemming from professional researchers rather than terrorists. American virologists focused on superantigens (from bats) and prion diseases (from deer) to develop animal vaccines.
A Chinese defector from Hong Kong claimed Covid was a bioweapon but rightfully sought asylum. Others alleging a Wuhan lab leak sought US citizenship, sometimes using any means for a green card. Viruses cannot be controlled, rendering them ineffective as bioweapons. No military utilizes viruses because conventional weapons or poison gas are more dependable. Bacteria such as anthrax and plague are preferred as bioweapons.
Chapter 13, turning Shi Zhengli, their villain, into the Wuhan whistleblower, finished my thought:
Wuhan’s appeal to Western virologists lies in its distance from Beijing, 700 miles away. A Chinese proverb encapsulates this distance: “The mountains are high, and the emperor is far away.” In February 2020, Cliff Lane from NIAID, a close colleague of Fauci, visited Beijing and reported on the tense atmosphere. He noted, “Nerves in China are very raw. High-level officials in Wuhan have been fired. We are in the middle of a political earthquake, and there will be enormous scrutiny of our work. Extraordinary measures, at great cost, have been put in place in China.”
According to The New York Times, Shi Zhengli is not affiliated with the Communist Party and is categorized as “nonpartisan,” a rarity for someone of her status as a state employee. The US State Department vetted Shi in May 2019 because of her role as a contractor for NIAID under the renewed EcoHealth grant. Peter Daszak remarked, “Shi’s also extremely indiscreet about how she speaks. She tells you things and expresses opinions that would get people into trouble in China.”
Most Chinese Communist Party-owned labs are in Beijing, while military labs are near the North Korean border. However, in the heart of the enormous country, Wuhan stands out with its concentration of civilian labs in a bustling college town. The pipeline of postdoctoral researchers from nearby universities has fueled cheap scientific inquiry, making Wuhan a prominent research hub near the bat caves where coronaviruses exist. Wuhan had become known as the world’s live Chinese horseshoe bat capital. Traveling to remote bat caves, capturing wild bats, and maintaining them in local labs for Western virology experiments was straightforward.
This was the only reason Wuhan was a story: Shi could keep the fragile Chinese horseshoe bat alive in captivity. As Baric wrote in 2018, “I have no bat colony, no way for me to do the experiment, which I definitely think needs to be done, or we have no credibility. My understanding [is] another bat colony exists in China.”
The natural origin camp did win a $100,000 bet
I reference this lost lab leak bet at the beginning and end of my book. It reminds the reader that the lab leak narrative (Shi did it) lacked evidence. It was based on rumor and innuendo.
But the natural origin camp will center on an irrelevant Wuhan wet market. They can’t answer: why Wuhan? Only Baric can. If you walk the streets of Wuhan, you will find Pravda and Starbucks, not bats or dirty bush meat.
China vs Missouri
China just countersued Missouri for $50 billion, after Missouri sued China for $25 billion.
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/china-sues-after-missouri-seeks-collect-25-billion-128502441
In early 2020, Missouri sued China for failing to share personal protective equipment. In early 2025, the Missouri Attorney General’s Office secured the largest judgment issued against a foreign sovereign. Missouri “intended to collect every penny by seizing Chinese-owned assets.” But there is doubt as to whether Missouri can enforce the judgment because federal law generally shields foreign nations from lawsuits in U.S. courts.
Missouri forced Fauci to testify in 2022, but he said “I don’t recall” 174 times during his deposition, and denied knowing Baric.
Lab leak debunk?
Below are 2 hours of a natural-origin talk, but no mention of DARPA Defuse.
My debunk (via Google’s AI interpreting my WHO SAGO letter)
Drosten to testify on lab leak
https://ansage.org/coronaluegen-vor-gericht-naechste-runde-im-drosten-wiesendanger-prozess/
The Christian Drosten testimony/trial was delayed until next year. He is the German equivalent of Baric and was on the original February 1, 2020, teleconference.
I appreciate Drosten for helping clarify who can do what. His analogy of Shi Zhengli being able to make a car stereo (shuffle spikes into the WIV1 backbone) but not a new car (SARS2 backbone) was perfect. He also presented evidence from MERS-MA30 implicating Baric.
Chinese supercar
I often liked Drosten’s analogy of the WIV (China) not being able to make a new car, but now a Chinese cell phone company has produced a supercar that no one in America can have:
Driverless cars in Wuhan
The world’s largest experiment with driverless cars is unfolding on Wuhan’s streets. A fleet of 1000 computer-driven taxis, often with no safety driver on board, already circulates through the city. This is the upside of a culture without Western-style “safety Karen” veto power.
Travel to China
China Extends 240-hour Visa-Free Transit Policy Coverage to 55 Countries
https://us.china-embassy.gov.cn/eng/lsfw/zj/qz2021/202412/t20241217_11495647.htm
Americans can now travel to China for up to 10 days visa-free. Best way to see China? High-speed trains.
Travel propaganda?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/world/asia/china-propaganda-travel-influencers.html
China’s embrace of foreign travel bloggers is a good thing. Western vloggers, shown below, replace slogans and geopolitics with ordinary people. Allowing outsiders to film freely reminds us that China is a place full of people, not just a political argument.
Anchor babies
Chinese elites are using American surrogates to build mega-families. These parents are paying millions to hire women in America’s largely unregulated surrogacy industry.
The market has grown so sophisticated, experts say, that at times Chinese parents have had U.S.-born children without stepping foot in the country. A thriving mini-industry of American surrogacy agencies, law firms, clinics, delivery agencies and nanny services — even to pick up the newborns from hospitals — has risen to accommodate the demand, permitting parents to ship their genetic material abroad and get a baby delivered back, at a cost of up to $200,000 per child.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/chinese-billionaires-create-mega-families-080000540.html
This issue was briefly mentioned in my book, but for the opposite reason:
The low-fertility trap has caught China, the world's most populous country, which could harm its economy and political stability. For the past four decades, China has avoided military conflicts. The Taiwan issue has a long military history. During World War II, Taiwan served as an unsinkable aircraft carrier for the Japanese to bomb China. Strategic ambiguity keeps the peace, as Chinese culture has not invaded Macau or Hong Kong for hundreds of years. But like most proud nations, it has a discriminatory past.
Leaked Tiananmen Square trial video
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/17/world/asia/china-general-tiananmen-square.html
When China’s rulers ordered tens of thousands of soldiers to crush pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing in 1989, Gen. Xu Qinxian was the commander who famously said no. He refused to lead his troops into the capital to help clear the protesters in Tiananmen Square by armed force. For decades, the story of his defiance remained murky.
Now, a leaked video of his secret court-martial has shed a rare light on General Xu, and on the tensions inside the military as Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader at the time, prepared to send the soldiers into Beijing.
General Xu does not beg for mercy. Instead, he tersely lays out why he refused to comply. “I said that whoever carries this out well could be a hero,” he tells the judges, “and I said that whoever carries this out poorly would become a sinner in history.” He tells the judges that he was speaking only for himself, not for the 38th Army, in refusing the order.
General Xu was court-martialed for refusing to obey oral orders to lead the 38th Army into Beijing during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. His defiance delayed the crackdown, but he was eventually detained and replaced. Sentenced to five years in prison, Xu died in 2021, maintaining to the end that he had no regrets.
Chinese lab leak journalist sentenced to prison, again
Zhang Zhan was previously jailed on the same charge for reporting on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan. A former lawyer, she travelled to Wuhan in February 2020 to provide on-the-ground information about what was happening there. She went missing in Wuhan in May 2020. It later emerged that she had been taken by the Chinese authorities and detained in Shanghai, where she was convicted of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” after a sham trial. Zhang Zhan was released on 13 May 2024 after completing a four-year prison sentence.
However, she was subjected to strict surveillance and continuous harassment by the authorities after her release, and she was detained again less than four months later. Her arrest came shortly after she reportedly travelled to the northwestern province of Gansu to show solidarity with other human rights defenders.
Notice that Zhan was snooping around the remote Wuhan BSL4, not Shi Zhengli’s downtown BSL2 facility:
Manhattan Project for China
In a high-security lab in Shenzhen, Chinese scientists have built what Washington, D.C. has spent years trying to prevent: a prototype of a machine capable of producing cutting-edge semiconductor chips that power artificial intelligence, smartphones, and weapons central to Western military dominance.
The irony is that Western tech giants, such as Google, which have left China, have significant access to Western user data for training their AI models.
Could China Have Gone Christian?
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/09/could-china-have-gone-christian.html
The Simple Mathematics of Chinese Innovation
Experts aren’t truth seekers
Tyler Cowen didn’t just fail to do his research on the many vaccine questions. He also persistently defended the increasingly indefensible party line on the origin of the virus itself.
He ridiculed Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs, who had chaired a Lancet committee looking at the origin question, until he disbanded it when he realized the committee was filled with conflicted liars, such as Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance. Sachs was light-years ahead of Cowen on the facts and biology, as demonstrated in this excellent conversation with physicist Steve Hsu. Yet Cowen hinted Sachs wasn’t being honest.
China’s nail houses
Is China’s psychological operation run by Beijing, or is it controlled more by greedy local officials?
Instead, “Heaven is high and the emperor is far away” seems more like the mundane reality of China. Instead of Stalinist central control from the Kremlin, ordinary Chinese tend to perceive abuse by corrupt local government officials and wish/hope/dream that de facto emperor Xi Jinping could intervene on their behalf. After all, that’s pretty much how kings won out over nobles in feudal Europe.
Movie on Unit 731
The film, 731, and renamed Evil Unbound, exposes the biological and chemical experiments committed by Unit 731 of the Japanese Army in Northeast China during the Sino-Japanese War and World War II. The Chinese film is told from an ordinary civilian’s perspective, revealing the human experiments conducted by Unit 731, but it is not available in America.
China vs America
Are suburbs the best or most boring part of America?
The Rorschach test framing captures something critical about how geopolitics hijacks scientific inquiry. When lab origin debates morph into regime change calls while ignoring Baric's UNC work, its clear the investigation became performative rather than forensic. The Drosten car analogy about WIV capabilities vs Baric's is spot on. I worked adjacnet to biosecurity policy for a bit and saw similar dynamics where technical questions got buried under strategic posturing. The surrogacy industry angle at the end is wild, basically regulatory arbitrage on steroids when you realize these arrangements bypass citizenship frameworks entirely.
See Baric's patent. For a "replication defective chimera- lab grown" all planned and created. See Eco-Health letter to Fauci " WE need a pan- virus that will convince the broad public to take a vaccine- use the media and the investors will follow". THEY DID EXACTLY THAT AND GAMED IT OUT WITH EVENT 201 AND THE PREP ACT.