A social media account on Twitter named “China is not our enemy” has emerged recently and is calling for an end to alienating China, a move which an academic believes is an attempt to help whitewash evil deeds committed by China’s Communist Party.

The account is understood to have been created by Code Pink, a left-wing advocacy group in the United States, according to an article published on Voice of America.

Code Pink is a women-led grassroots organization working to end U.S. war and militarism and to support peace and human rights initiatives, the group says on its website. It was founded in 2002 in an effort to prevent the U.S. war in Iraq.

The website also lists 13 campaigns that are underway, including “President for Peace,” “Divest from the War Machine” and “Exposing War Crime”. Each campaign has a designated webpage to promote its cause.

Code Pink has created Twitter accounts for four of the campaigns, including “China is not our enemy,” which is placed at the top of the campaign list.

On the website, the organization also says that it is undertaking the drive because “the same method used to drive us to war in Iraq is being used to drive a narrative that we should fear China,” which could trigger the next Cold War or even a nuclear war between the two nations.

The organization called on the public to “advocate peace with China” to avoid any war. Its activities included holding weekly forums, writing and retweeting pro-China, anti-war and anti-U.S. articles, and getting people to sign a petition addressed to Senator Kamala Harris, the U.S. vice president-elect, to stop anti-Chinese rhetoric.

A scholar criticised the campaign, saying Code Pink was trying to whitewash the evil deeds of the Communist Party.

Catherine Chow, a history professor of Grinnell College in Iowa, noted that the group posted videos and articles from China Daily, all of which showed the Chinese government denying the existence of a massive surveillance operation targeted at Uighurs.

Articles published on the website were written by either pro-China groups or people like John Ross, a left-wing political activist from the United Kingdom, Chow said.

She challenged the stance of the group, which was supposedly anti-war and supportive of Asians. Code Pink failed to criticize the Chinese government’s military threats on Taiwan, she said.

Another U.S. academic, Dan Garrett, said he had observed some kind of collaboration between the Chinese government and Code Pink when he was studying a substantial amount of pro-China articles circulating on state media platforms and cited by western media.

Code Pink might not have been directly founded by the United Front Work Department of the Communist Party, but at least, it would have the department’s endorsement for its overseas missions, Garrett said, adding that this kind of anti-war group shared beliefs with the party on “anti-imperialism.”

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