The Great China Bamboozle

What do Cardi B and Emmanuel Macron have in common? It's nothing to do with wet asses, but rather an apparent weakness for Chinese disinformation. It's hard to summon up too much sympathy for Big Pharma, but it seems AstraZeneca is being shafted time and again by Beijing's alternative-reality generators. How else to explain the continual upsets with its vaccine programme on the Continent, where problems seem to occur that don't affect British people? It doesn't work on over-65s. It gives you blood clots. It's far less effective than the Sinovac. And the Sputnik. And the fact that AZ is aiming to send vaccines all over the world without making a profit is neither here nor there to the Chinese and Russians.

As for Cardi B, the rapper and mistress of the profane briefly became a hero to the website CGTN when she told her social media followers about a fascinating YouTube she'd seen explaining why China had dealt with the virus so much better than America was doing. CGTN — sounds a bit like CCN crossed with MSNBC, doesn't it? But it's nothing of the sort. The website looks rudimentary but this Beijing equivalent of Russia Today is not to be lightly dismissed. A BBC File on 4 episode this month called The Disinformation Dragon is well worth listening to — but won't help you sleep at night. The scale of China's disinformation ambition is startling: it is apparently building its own shadow internet, known by some as the "splinternet", which has one key difference from the one we know and love to hate: it's centrally controlled. Now China's infrastructure generosity to much of Africa starts to make sense.

Boris Johnson is undoubtedly right: we're way past the point where we can confront China. It's been playing the long game for too long. But we can keep ourselves informed about its activities. Disinformation is one of its key weapons, and like Russia it has learnt that ten lies are more effective than one lie told ten times, even if — or perhaps especially if — they contradict one another. I'm certain that continental Europe's vaccine vacillation is being influenced by Chinese lies. More dangerous than any blood clot.