I think it was 2017 when I first heard about China’s four modern great inventions: high-speed rail, mobile payments, online shopping, and bike sharing. Modeled on the four historical inventions of paper, gunpowder, printing, and the compass, these four new inventions embodied a certain civilizational pride, affirming modern China’s contributions to the world.

The only problem, of course, was that none of these were actually invented in China.

Anyone familiar with popular nationalist discourse in China today, however, could not be surprised by such claims. During my time living in China, one of the idiosyncrasies of daily life that fascinated me endlessly was the frequency with which certain staples of the modern world would be revealed as “Chinese” without any even remotely plausible historical basis.

Take for example the claim that soccer originated in China. Cuju is a game that supposedly originated in the Han Dynasty, in which players kick a ball and are forbidden from using their hands. Cuju supposedly makes China “the cradle of the earliest form of football,” according to Joseph Blatter, who is not only the former president of FIFA but is also not so subtle in his pandering. To take such a claim even remotely seriously, one would have to believe that kicking a ball was a one-time cultural discovery that spread around the world from a singular point.

Pasta, we are told, only became part of Italian cuisine after Marco Polo brought this discovery to Italy from China. To imagine that people in Europe were unable to come up with the idea of noodles without instructions from the Central Kingdom is a unique testament to cultural onanism.

Arriving at the imaginative claim that China invented pizza, we seem to have reached the absolute limits of plausibility. Like a fine piece of surrealist performance art, this claim is based simply on the scallion pancake (congyoubing). No evidence is provided that the scallion pancake influenced pizza, nor that the scallion pancake even precedes the invention of pizza historically. The simple fact that a pizza and a scallion pancake are of the same general shape, plus the near universal resonance of pizza, means that this global cultural fixture needs to be rooted in China: not so much because the argument makes sense, but because that’s what people want.

If one had a strong taste for irony, surveying these examples one might even say that one of the great inventions of modern China is the invention of implausible historical narratives to claim endless inventions as particularly Chinese.

The passion with which certain cultural fixtures are claimed as Chinese is matched only by the denial of ownership of some things that did indeed originate in China. Take, for example, COVID-19, China’s unforgettable contribution to the year 2020. The elaborate series of bizarre stories that Beijing has cooked up to deny this pandemic’s roots in Wuhan are in my reading even more fascinating and indeed revealing than the claims examined above.

Way back in March of 2020, when it was only beginning to become apparent that this virus was growing into a global pandemic, Foreign Ministry spokesperson and tinfoil hat connoisseur Zhao Lijian was already claiming that the virus had been brought to Wuhan by the US military during the Military World Games in October 2019. Zhao may be a complete nutcase, but at least he was not completely denying Wuhan’s central role in the emergence of this pandemic: he was just blaming it on others.

This mode of argument was taken to its limits that same month, when Chinese media briefly pushed the claim that COVID-19 might have come from outer space. Supposedly the sudden emergence and rapid spread of the virus defied conventional epidemiological analysis. So then of course the only logical explanation for the origins of the virus would be outer space, traveling to earth on a meteorite.

It takes a unique mixture of imagination and shamelessness to push such claims, so things quieted down slightly after the outer space argument. A recent finding that seemed to suggest that some cancer patients in Italy had COVID-19 antibodies in September 2019, however, reignited these wild accusations.

After excitedly placing the blame on Italy for a few days (pizza comes from China but COVID comes from Italy?), Beijing’s attention suddenly shifted to India and Bangladesh. A now deleted paper uploaded to SSRN by scientists at the Chinese Academy of Science and Fudan University proposed that COVID-19 originated in India: a heat wave in the summer of 2019 produced a water shortage which led to humans and animals sharing water, sparking the pandemic.

The researchers did not directly observe any such events. They did not even bother travelling to India to ask if anything like this actually happened. Rather, insofar as there is obviously a state-level project to deny COVID-19′s origins in China, the desired conclusion literally shaped the evidence that the scientists themselves produced. It’s all very postmodern: one might call it scallion pancake epidemiology.

These examples all indicate that, on the one-year anniversary of COVID-19′s first known and confirmed case, Beijing is more interested in floating untenable conspiracy theories than in understanding the origins of this virus. This gives me pause, particularly as the world continues to grapple with the chaos and tragedy of this outbreak.

A comparative look Beijing’s responses to COVID-19 and SARS is thought-provoking. I was living in China in the aftermath of SARS. There was an extremely proactive search for the zoonotic origins of SARS, followed by the widely publicized culling of civet cats, presumed to be the reservoir through which the virus passed to humans.

Considering how much more widespread and dangerous COVID-19 has proven to be compared to SARS, one would think that Beijing would be even more proactive in seeking out and dealing with any potential reservoirs of this virus before there is another outbreak.

And yet nothing of this type appears to be happening in China today. Wouldn’t the virus still be circulating in animals? Couldn’t it then leap to humans again? Shouldn’t there be research and prevention work done on this? The most commonly assumed source for the virus is pangolins, but pangolin scales are still readily available on Taobao. How does any of this make sense?

This dual process of floating outlandish theories of COVID’s foreign origins while remaining nonchalant about zoonotic threats at home suggests to me that this virus could very likely be the product of an accidental lab leak or some other controllable event that Beijing wants to keep secret: this seemed completely implausible to me at first, but watching Beijing’s behavior over the past eleven months has made this implausible theory seem ever more reasonable.

According to this theory, Beijing would know the origin of the virus and would thus be confident that it now has the source under control, thereby explaining why it is not engaging in the type of investigations and preemptive measures that we saw in the aftermath of SARS. At the same time, Beijing would of course attempt to dodge responsibility and distract the search for origins by promoting all types of crazy theories and pointing fingers elsewhere: the sign of a guilty conscience.

This is not a scientific theory, but rather a political theory based on my understanding of the CCP and a comparison of its response to two health crises. There is, in my reading, no other reasonable way to explain Beijing’s simultaneous nonchalance with regard to potential animal reservoirs and apparent urgency to float untenable conspiracy theories.

All that this political theory shows conclusively, however, is the need for there to be a genuinely independent scientific investigation into this virus, which we are not getting from the WHO and are certainly not getting from China. We cannot leave a pandemic that has killed over a million worldwide to be explained by sloppy scallion pancake epidemiology.

(Kevin Carrico, Senior Lecturer in Chinese Studies at Monash University)

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