The following post is written by Dr. Fu Kingwah, associate professor at the Journalism and Media Studies Centre of the Hong Kong University and convener of censorship monitoring projects, Weibosocope and Wechatscope. The post was originally published on Meedan’s Misinfodemic Report on July 28, 2020. An edited version is republished on Global Voices with the permission of Dr. Fu and Meedan's Misinfodemic team. China’s strategy to control COVID-19 narratives has become a global concern as the coronavirus has claimed more than 700,000 lives worldwide by early August. The origin of the virus has become a most contentious issue in international diplomacy and will likely continue to make an impact on the world's politics. On March 12, 2020, China’s deputy director of its Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Zhao Lijian published an unusual tweet. It claimed that the United States army brought COVID-19 to China when the country participated in the October 2019 Military Olympic Games. The claim, if not a conspiracy, was not supported by any evidence. It spread like wildfire, becoming a global piece of misinformation about the origin of the pandemic. A few days later, disinformation messages arrived on the cell phones and social media feeds of individual American citizens. One post read: “The Trump administration is about to lock down the entire country,” which the White House later said to be false. United States’ intelligence officials, who spoke with the New York Times on the condition of anonymity, have attributed the messages to Chinese operatives, and considered the tactic to be “unprecedented.” Weiboscope, a censorship monitoring project that monitors the Chinese social platform Weibo for disinformation, misinformation, and censorship, has observed how the Chinese government exerts information control over COVID-19 narratives inside China since the early stage of the outbreak. On the afternoon of December 31, 2019, a Weibo post read, “Wuhan pneumonia cannot be judged to be SARS. Wuhan has the only virus laboratory in the country and is also a world-class virology laboratory. There are ways to deal with the virus. If Wuhan can’t figure it out, no one can handle it.” It was swiftly censored within an hour. The post mentioned both the SARS-like nature of the virus, suggesting its high infection rate, and the Wuhan laboratory, signaling the origin of the virus. Based on our knowledge of the government’s censorship system, both of these characteristics seem to be attributable to the decision to remove the post from the social platform. At the time, social media was already seeing speculations that a new kind of pneumonia was linked to a SARS-like disease, according to Weiboscope data. Ophthalmologist Dr. Li Wenliang, who learned about the then-mysterious illness in a hospital, had sent a message in the popular Chinese private messaging app WeChat warning other medical doctors about the unnamed disease. Wenliang was then accused, along with another six people, of disturbance of public order by local authorities. He later died of the disease that would be known as COVID-19. On December 31, 2019, the same day that post was removed from Weibo, and shortly after Wenliang’s warning, the Chinese government claimed that the “viral pneumonia cases” had “no apparent pattern of human-to-human transmission” and were “preventable and controllable.” It also informed the World Health Organization and the United States of those conclusions. Less than a month later, on January 20, the Chinese central government announced the COVID-19 epidemic to the public. A group of leading Chinese virologists appeared on a state television program and confirmed that the virus was transmissible between humans. Censoring virus-related messages in late December and early January may have put countless Chinese people unknowingly at risk of infection, depriving them of receiving early warnings from media and social media about the highly transmissible disease. The censorship and information control may have also delayed the general public’s response to take necessary and timely protective measures. Internet and digital technology have been profoundly shaping China’s social, economic, and political domains. Even though the internet is known to serve as an enabler for citizen activism, the state’s repressive power is remarkably strengthened by the means of digital technologies. Chinese authorities have strongly emphasized the concept of cyber sovereignty, which broadly extends the notion of cybersecurity as a justification to control certain online activities viewed as a potential threat to the state’s stability.