The Real Meaning Behind China’s Viral UFO Video

While Russia has long made an effort to weaponize Western conspiracy theories to exacerbate mistrust and polarization in countries like the United States, China has been slower to catch on. Preferring to focus its early malign influence operations on Taiwan, its big debut in the effort to link information warfare to conspiracy theory occurred during the COVID-19 global pandemic, when the Chinese government helped promote the discredited idea that the virus was manufactured in a U.S. weapons laboratory. The Chinese social media and content creation platform, TikTok, has also been a major vector for conspiracy theory, promoting the circulation of videos on all manner of conspiracy theories, from the hollow to the flat earth and beyond. However, China's latest foray into conspiracy theory appears to have seized on U.S. conspiracy theorists' current and most enduring obsession: unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and the aliens believed by many to pilot them.

What is driving the puzzling politics of the UFO in great power competition? China appears to be taking advantage of the confluence of three recent events…

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