Ep. 24: China Conspiracy Theories

From Covid as a bioweapon to Chinese soldiers infiltrating America, Alexander Boyd discusses the right-wing conspiracy theories that lead our ranking of bestselling China books.

The China Books Podcast is a companion of China Books Review, a project of Asia Society’s Center on U.S.-China Relations and The Wire, a digital business platform that also publishes The Wire China. For any queries or comments, please write to editor[at]chinabooksreview.com.

Transcript

 At China Books Review, we spend most of our time reading and talking about books that engage deeply with the nation, whether through fiction or nonfiction. Some of them our reviewers rate highly, others less so but we like to put the spotlight on thoughtful books that carry the conversation around China forward and maybe tell us something new. Another part of our work, though, is that since we launched in October 2023, we've been keeping a monthly list of bestselling China books. That is, books written about China in English that rank the highest by amazon.com sales data, which is an incomplete measure, but a reliable yardstick for America at least. 

From the start, we noticed a trend, perhaps unsurprising, that the bestselling China books weren't reflective of the titles we felt were the best China books. In particular, three categories of books consistently ranked in the top five: cookbooks, young adult novels and right-wing conspiracy theories, especially those that pushed a Cold War redux vision of China as an enemy of the United States. So this month on the podcast, our 24th episode, we're going to examine that trend putting aside the cookbooks and, for now, focusing on the third category of what we might call “China is Evil” books.

Joining me to walk through some of those bestselling titles is Alexander Boyd, associate editor at China Books Review since the start of this year, who recently published a column on the site titled What America Reads About China, about just this phenomenon. 

Alec Ash: Alexander, I'd say welcome on the pod but you've hosted it before yourself, so welcome back as cohost. 

Alexander: Thank you for having me, Alec. I'm really excited to be on here and talk about these wonderful books that I've had the great joy of reading over the past few months.

Do I detect sarcasm?

Yes. These books are not wonderful. Although I actually have enjoyed reading them because I think I've learned a lot about how America sees China and in turn sees itself. So it's been quite edifying.

Then I want to say thank you for your service for reading some of these books so that we don't have to. 

I do want to note for the record that we are nonpartisan at China Books Review. We want to be informed of all views, which is part of why we're doing this episode, nor do we want to be unduly judgmental. All opinions we're expressing are just our own. But I do think it is important to call out the crazies when it comes to China books because, as I mentioned, these are the main sources of information on China for the majority of the American population, which is a pretty scary thought. So to kick things off, can you tell us more about our bestseller list and what you noticed in it as you were researching your article?

Our best seller list is something that we publish monthly. We list the five best sellers on Amazon, as you mentioned just before.

And while looking at this list, I was really blown away by the types of titles that are most popular. You have things like Xi Van Fleet’s Mao’s America (2023) and, of course, the books that we're going to be discussing today. Many of them have a conspiratorial right-wing bent. But I think what's really striking about them most is, as you might pick up from the quote Mao’s America, they're more about the United States than they are about China. They're more about how China has infiltrated American society, in these authors' perceptions, and how China is going for global dominance against the United States — some of which may be true but often the way these arguments are framed is extremely over the top.

Yeah. Mao’s America, if I recall, was a sort of, “We've got the culture of revolution happening around us in Woke America.” Something like that.

Yes. I think that's a pretty standard line in many of these books. We spend a good deal of time digging through Amazon to see what's new and as you mentioned, it's not all Cold War and conspiracies. There's a lot of young adult literature, cookbooks, of course, because America has an enduring love affair with Chinese food and in recent months we've seen a turn for the better, I would say. Books like House of Huawei (2025) by Eva Dou and Apple in China (2025) by Patrick McGee have made the list. These are really well sourced, argued books about China by veteran reporters, one of which we'll be discussing today, which is New Cold Wars (2024) by David Sanger.

Yeah some of the books are definitely legit. The current bestseller is Apple in China, which seems pretty well sourced. Although looking at our spreadsheet of the list now, even the cookbooks and the YA stuff is really crowded out by conservative commentary on China. And this sort of “China bad” narrative, it really dominates the bestseller list.

So let's get into some examples of it. We're gonna just run through the five books in order which have been the most sticky on our list. All of them occupied the top spot, some of them for multiple months. Let's start with Tom Cotton, a US Senator for Arkansas and noted China hawk, whose book Seven Things You Can't Say About China (2025) was top bestseller in February this year. First up, I gotta say surely that commercial success is because his super PAC was buying up copies, right? I can't imagine that all of us are rushing to the bookstore to buy new book about China.

Well, that I can't prove. Although I did dig through some FEC records to see whether or not those have been published yet because we do know that Tom Cotton's earlier book, Sacred Duty: A Soldier’s Tour at Arlington National Cemetery (2019), was boosted by the Senate Conservatives Fund, the Political Action Committee founded by former Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina. They bought $90,000 of the book in bulk.

This is a very common phenomenon across the GOP. You've seen books like Ted Cruz's book, Mike Pence's book, people like that and they have political action committees purchase these books and then give them out as party favors to people who attend their events and other things like that. But of course, they artificially boost them into the New York Times bestselling list. I can't say for certain whether or not Tom Cotton engaged in any shenanigans around these book sales, but, I would be surprised if this book was organically so popular due to its mind numbingly boring prose. 

Go on then, what are the seven things we can't say about China, even though he literally is saying them in a published book?

Tom Cotton is a sitting US senator in the majority and he is the head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, so this is a very serious man who is absolutely allowed to say these things, but the seven things he says, you can't say because China sympathizers will ruin your life and career are: one, China is an evil empire; two, China is preparing for war; three, China is waging economic world war — so I guess it already is doing war; four, China has infiltrated our society; five, China has infiltrated our government; six, China is coming for our kids — hide them; seven, China could win. 

I'm shaking in my boots already. Tell us more. How would you distill his argument of why we should be so frightened of China?

Tom Cotton is a very sophisticated, very intelligent guy. A lot of his book uses very direct plain language in order to spread his message as far as possible and the basic idea is that China is an implacable enemy of the United States, and will use all measures available to it, both traditional and non-traditional, to destroy the United States’ society and its influence abroad.

When it's talking about infiltration of our society, he's often citing traditional right-wing boogeymen, like Hollywood elites who have censored their movies. We all have images of that, of John Cena, the popular WWE wrestler, begging for forgiveness to his Chinese fans after calling Taiwan a country in Chinese.

That's a pretty good impression.

But things like that, which I think we might all agree are quite pathetic, Tom Cotton will say are indicative of elite capture by the Chinese Communist Party. So I think that the basic gist of his book seems to be trying to prepare America psychologically for conflict with China that we should be prepared to fight because his argument is that they're definitely preparing to fight us.

You've got a quote for us. You picked out something. Can you read this little quote? I think it's about fentanyl, right?

Yeah. All of these books discuss Fentanyl, but Tom Cotton probably does it in the most interesting way out of any, so here it goes. On page 149, Tom Cotton goes, “The Chinese communists aren't only mass murderers, invaders and liars, they're also drug dealers. The Chinese Communist Party has unleashed the deadliest drug crisis in our history by engineering and fueling the fentanyl epidemic that's devastating America's youth. China's central role in the fentanyl epidemic is rather ironic given how Chinese communists still lecture westerners about the Opium Wars. China is engaging a reverse opium War against America, or perhaps a second revolutionary opium war, which is a reference there to to a quote that Jun Chang attributes to Mao Zedong in her book Mao: The Real Story [Ed. note: It’s The Unknown Story.] in which Mao allegedly bragged about selling opium in Yan’an

Oh, okay. So “reverse Opium War” is a Maoism. 

Reverse Opium War is Tom Cotton's. Tom Cotton casts himself as a modern day Lin Zexu. So for those of you who don't know, Lin Zexu was a Qing official who was very anti-opium and wrote a letter to the English Queen, that was eventually published in the British tabloids in the 1800s, accusing her of murdering Chinese through opium. He also started executing western opium dealers and burning opium. Some of his actions really triggered the Opium Wars. Tom Cotton, I think, probably admires this guy, although he doesn't mention him by name in the book and argues that America should basically take similar measures to destroy opium.

But what he's saying is that the Communist party has drug dealing in its bones. In the 1990s, this Taiwanese historian, Chen Yong-fa itled wrote a paper titled Poppies under the Red Sun: The Opium Trade and the Yan’an Model, which proved that the party financed its activities in the revolutionary base of Yan’an during the Civil War through the production and sale of opium.

So Tom Cotton will take a truth and, in fact a truth that requires a fair amount of research, and then say a sweeping claim that the CCP is a drug dealing organization. I think everyone can make their own judgements on that. Fentanyl's a major problem of course in American society, but I find it a little bit hard to swallow.

I'm not as convinced by you that Tom Cotton was deeply researching Qing dynasty scholar officials and Yan’an law. But fentanyl is one of those two obvious hot button issues for the right which pop up in these books. The other one being COVID. It's also the one issue where China does seem to want to cooperate and has already made indications in some efforts to cooperate.

And as you said, there are arguments that some of Fentanyl traders are state sponsored or state's profiting through it. But it seems pretty disingenuous to me of Cotton to make it sound like it's Xi Jinping himself up the powder in the lab. When this is for one issue which is, a pretty obvious area where both sides have wanted to collaborate. But on the other hand, the reverse is a pretty catchy title. 

It's a very catchy title. And I think that when contending with these books, that's something that you need to contend with, that these phrases, “reverse Opium War” is very easy to stick in people's heads.

We're gonna move on so we can get through these. And I don't wanna spend any more time thinking about Tom Cotton than I need to, but it's gonna get worse folks. Next up we have RFK, Robert Kennedy Jr., and his book, The Wuhan Coverup (2023) which topped our list in January, 2024, and was pretty sticky in the top five for half a year after it. So obviously we're on COVID now: lab theory, but also there's some stuff about the U.S.’s role in gain of function research or something. Put me out of my misery, tell me what this book is going on about.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., probably all listeners are aware, is the current Secretary of Health and Human Services of the federal government. So he's the most powerful health official in the nation. This book, The Wuhan Coverup, should be read as a follow up — well, it should not be read — but should be considered a follow up to his earlier book called Anthony Fauci: The Real Story [Ed. Note: The correct title is The Real Anthony Fauci.] which was published during COVID and was very influential in anti-vaxxer movements, anti-COVID vaccine movements. So this book, The Wuhan Coverup, is a 600-page diatribe against COVID vaccines and against American officials who RFK Junior alleges helped create a lab leaked bio weapon.

The main villains, of course, in Kennedy's telling are Bill Gates and Fauci. Kennedy is classic conspiracy theorist move when he intentionally muddles a predictable disaster with a planned one. So he cites correctly. He has copious footnotes in this book that Bill Gates and Anthony Fauci were consistently warning that the Trump administration would face a major bio weapon threat or biological threat. The fact of the matter is every single administration faces this, right? And they were specifically saying the Trump administration's not ready. Now when COVID breaks out he then points at these statements and says, “Could it be a coincidence? How could they even have said this?”

How could Bill Gates have been warning about pandemics for years if he wasn't actively planning one?

Yes and then some of this goes, the bestselling nature of this book is because we still actually do not know for certain the origin of the COVID-19 virus. Was it natural? Was it in a cave from Yunnan? Could it possibly have escaped from a lab? These questions aren't known simply because the WHO has been unable to conduct a free and fair inquiry into the nature of the pandemic. And that's given a lot of cover to the American right-wing conspiracy theorists. Now, I think these people would say whatever they wanted to say, no matter whether or not there was a WHO report. 

Kennedy finds places of social distrust and really escalates fear. If you ever heard Kennedy on a podcast, he bombards you with random statistics and acronyms. So the average Kennedy sentence has four or five acronyms, and they're all shady global initiatives like the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation (CEPI) and Gavi, aka the Global Alliance for Vaccines Immunization. He takes these things and because they're big words and they sound potentially nefarious, he says it's an elite global cabal of people trying to poison you.

Yeah I read parts of the sample on Amazon, which is basically the whole book, and at first glance, it looks “oh, this is pretty levelheaded, and oh wow, there's so many footnotes and acronyms and so on.” So it seems sensible until your brain actually processes the content of what he is saying. Like you said, the lab theory itself is plausible. I'm not a scientist. I've listened to a fair amount of scientific consensus for “Hey, we have this very obvious Occam's razor of a cluster of outbreak in the Wuhan seafood market and a high degree of unlikeliness for the virus could have changed so quickly from the gain of function research in the lab but we can't rule it out.” 

What strikes me about the book is more that he disingenuously is playing up one side. It also struck me in the book — he keeps going back to Anthony Fauci every other paragraph which just left me wondering what is that beef? Did Fauci steal RFK’s roadkill or something?

He believes that Fauci engineered the brain worm.

Next up, we have Gordon Chang, the American conservative columnist. Many of our listeners will be familiar with him from his 2001 book, The Coming Collapse of China (2001), in which he predicted that the CCP would collapse by 2011. But it's okay. We can give him a few more decades.

His new book Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America (2024) has been pretty consistent on our bestseller list since it came out last fall. So, as I understand it, we've gone from the impending demise of the CCP to its imminent invasion of America to destroy everything we hold dear. But walk us through Alexander what exactly is this red plan?

This book by Gordon G. Chang, not to be confused with Gordon H. Chang, who's the writer of this wonderful book called Ghosts of Gold Mountain (2019) about the history of the Chinese and the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1800s. 

This is Gordon G. Chang, as you mentioned, his previous books. This book, Plan Red, is more pamphlet than a book. I think in terms of total text, excluding blank pages, acknowledgements, photographs, it's like under 60 pages and the basic point of this one is that the PLA is going to murder you and your family and I'm not really paraphrasing right here. Let me read a quote for you from this: 

Please. 

I'll read this quote, quote page 69, so he's discussing a place called the Darien Gap, which is where migrants from South America cross into Central America for the first time. It's impenetrable jungle. It's very difficult, very dangerous. Page 69: “At the Darien Gap, I have seen countless packs of Chinese males of military age unattached to family groups and pretending not to understand English, all headed to the American border. One group of six young men bought a chicken at the 10 hotel, drank its blood from small glasses. Then cooked the chicken themselves in the hotel restaurant, according to the hotel manager. Drinking raw chicken blood is a right among some PLA soldiers. Once here, the military fighters… and so then goes on to describe how they're going to cross the southern border and that in fact they're in Idaho doing target practice.

And when you look for sources on all these, it's WhatsApp messages from random sources that I don't think have much credibility. But he continues: “Once here, the military fighters can link up with China's agents who are already in place. The concern is that on the first day of war in Asia, these agents will take down American's power lines, poison reservoirs, assassinate officials, start wildfires, spread pathogens, and create terror by bombing shopping malls in supermarkets.”

Wow, I'm getting goosebumps. Are we safe right now?

They're coming for podcast studios first, Alec

First off, I gotta say I love that group of Chinese migrants fresh to America did not trust that restaurant to cook that chicken for them and just said look we're going for it. We're just going to take your kitchen while drinking chicken blood as a toast to the impending destruction of America.

This kind of thing strikes me as more dangerous than the other two almost because it's directly feeding suspicions for Chinese immigrants of PLA soldiers or Chinese spies. The sort of thing that ruin careers with the China initiative. And it feeds into anti-Asian hate because let's face it, no one's gonna stop to make that distinction between Chinese and Chinese American or just Asian-American.

Oh, no, absolutely. I think it's incredibly insidious. It does so many things. It demonizes migrants, right? Like you had this phenomenon last year in the last two years of Chinese people coming from mainland China — sometimes fleeing political persecution, sometimes fleeing actual prosecutions for debt and other issues and sometimes just looking for more economic opportunity — walking up through Central America, into the United States. And these people are, for the most part, just people in search of opportunity. If you're a Chinese student in America and you embrace American culture by going to the firing range and shooting an AR-15 all of a sudden you're a PLA soldier practicing. And if you read this book and believe it, you might actually do something terrible to an innocent person.

And I find that this book is quite infuriating and dangerous. It's also preposterous, right? The story of PLA soldiers drinking chicken's blood.

It's also a reminder that you can be hawkish without going over the top. You can draw attention to PLA influence in China, you can draw attention to Chinese spies in America without trying to indict the entirety of the Chinese migrant population. You can have an anti-China opinion, anti-CCP stance without damaging your argument as I see that these books do when it gets lost in hyperbole and chicken blood. 

Yeah. I think that's an interesting thing about these books is that some more than others are based on the work of actual journalists, actual researchers, actual historians, who have spent immense labor carefully and conservatively, often, drawing conclusions about what China's doing in the United States. Tom Cotton's book does a great job of citing the work that he bases his conclusions off. I think he often makes specious conclusions but he at least shows there's legitimate things when he is talking about PLA influence, he cites Alex Jukes spies and Lies. He talks about surveillance state and he talks about leads of Lynn and Josh Chin. And these are all, really reputable people who have written really reputable books. And these are serious issues that should be discussed in serious ways. And then you get to, gordon Chang, which is the bottom of the pile. And it's just, yeah, as you said, a WhatsApp message from a guy who claims to have seen him out of binoculars in his backyard. And that type of thing gets very dangerous very quickly.

So go to the bibliography. 

Next up we have Peter Schweitzer, editor at large at Breitbart and his book Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans (2024), which topped our list last spring, but came back again in January. It was also a New York Times number one bestseller.

We've gone from chicken blood to blood money. I think we get it by now. The red color on China's national flag is literally the blood of American patriots being siphoned off by the evil socialist empire. So that Xi Jinping can drink it along with his chicken. So what is the blood money here? Are we back on Fentanyl and COVID, or is there other stuff in here as well?

This is the Big Kahuna of conspiracy theories: so we've got fentanyl, we've got COVID, we've got TikTok — which is favorite of all the writers, but specifically Schweitzer as well, which they call a digital opium. So opium is also a recurring theme in these books and his book, like many of these other conspiracy theories, but his book does are probably the most the open is organized around Chung Yu, which are Chinese idioms, and these Chung yu often have a story behind them, but they're not particularly revealing of anything. And and he has chapters like hide a Dagger and a smile like Shay, he's tongue doll. It's it's ridiculous, it's the equivalent of a Chinese nationalist capturing his chapters, hook, line and sinker. Like lie, we've been sold by America. I don't think proves anything.

Yeah, I know. I notice how a lot of these books they'll always revert back, tofu, man, shit, it's so bipolar. They spend a lot of time talking about China's a socialist empire. It's just like the SSR but they'll always end up with, China's always been a sneaky motherfucker. 'cause look at this quote from the Art of War.

Absolutely. I think that's a great way to put it. So for TikTok, which we mentioned earlier, he says that the Chinese version of TikTok, or Douyin, is very educational. It is very wholesome. It protects youth very well. And while there are more restrictions on Douyin within China than there are in the United States on TikTok, I think it would be a huge stretch to say that it has beneficial effects on children. I think if you ask most Chinese parents how Douyin, Kuaishou, et cetera have affected their kids they would probably say it's terrible, just like American parents.

But these type of things I think give people the false impression that the Communist Party is this kind of benevolent, all powerful force within China and evil outside of it. Of course they also say that it's evil within China too. But, he casts the Party as able to both protect and nourish the Chinese people while also claiming that it's this evil force destroying the rest of the globe.

Yeah, there is something quite bipolar there. I was thinking about the TikTok thing you were talking about because I was so fascinated by that brief obsession that TikTok users in America had with Xiaohongshu RedNote, which to me struck me as a bit of a screw you t the American political line that you should be so frightened of Chin and it's spying on you. I think a lot of Gen Z on TikTok felt this is ridiculous: we're just posting personal videos. And it felt to me like it was a pushback against exactly this kind of book and this kind of politician who have spent years telling the American people that they should be so frightened of China. And now we're seeing a bit of a blowback against it. I think. 

Schweitzer and Chang and the rest of them are pointing at real phenomenons and I think they're disadvantaging their argument because there are real things to be scared of and real influence. But if you're so shrill about it, then it turns off your audience in that way or you're only preaching to the converted.

Yeah, no and you're, you are right to note that surveillance in China's actions within China, of course Tom Cotton spent significant amount of time on repression in Xinjiang and Tibet and these are serious issues that the United States government should respond to and these are things that are truly beyond the pale. But it cheapens, I think, the argument when you compare the incarceration of a million plus Uyghurs in prisons with no charges only based on their ethnicity and religion to John Cena wanting to make more money selling Fast and Furious in China.

Or equate that to cancel culture. So you've thrown us a bone at the end of your list, which is an actually good book New Cold Wars (2024) by David Sanger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, which topped our list in March and April of 2024.

It was also one of NPR’s best books of the year for that year. Presumably you've included this title to give us a glimmer of hope that there are some even headed takes on China reaching the American population.

I think your hopes were too high for me, Alec. I chose it because he was particularly influential in this last Biden administration where he broke a lot of stories and had very high contacts within the Biden government. So you could see how they're responding to the rise of China and Russia's new assertiveness. Much of the book discusses the war in Ukraine, so it's a little bit outside of our normal remit, but I did find it quite fascinating the way that American tech companies and the American government were collaborating in the defense of Ukraine and how the war ended up actually being a surprise. They were expecting kind of a techno-futurist war, that they were gonna enlist Microsoft to help them fight and instead we're seeing something much more like World War I with trench warfare, individual combat, now with a drone addition, right? So it's, something's totally new, but perhaps less cyber than they expected it to be. 

The book is interesting because it's pretty sympathetic to the Biden administration and the way it's tried to handle these issues. I can't say that I really spent that much time with it because in a sense it does read a little bit like a a very long New York Times article. It is very well sourced and has a compelling look at how the American government reacts to these things — that's not just a WhatsApp message.

I'm reminded of something you said at the top of the podcast, which is that a lot of these books, which are partisan on both sides are really not about China at all. They're just people looking into the mirror at China and seeing America.

Yeah, I think that's all too endemic to the way that we look at China that we are all just so many Narcissus looking at ourselves. China and America are remarkably similar. Soon we're going to have an event with Dan Wang on his book Breakneck (2025). In that book he says that he's convinced there's no two societies in the world more similar than America and China. And I think that for many Americans like myself who go to China, we do feel at home and Chinese people are extremely welcoming to us. I'm not sure if we've been as welcoming to Chinese coming to America.

But I think that these two nations are so drastically similar. Their stories are so tied together in the 21st century that it is almost natural for these books to reflect that. But I think some of it is just a much cheaper reason: really understanding China is very hard work. It takes a lot of linguistic practice, it takes a lot of effort and it takes a lot of having an open mind and I don't think these authors are necessarily the best representations of that.

Final question, Alexander, having read these books, what is your take? As an American who follows the China space yourself, did any of these books succeed in turning you into a China uber hawk or did they instead turn you off from that kind of world view?

While reading these books, I was really struck, oddly enough, to China in the 1950s, which was a period of immense change and war against America in the Korean War. There was a lot of campaigns about public health, hygienity, modernity and there was a link between biological contagion and a social contagion where American pathogens released into China were causing rot.

Then you also had all these old social habits from quote unquote "feudal" China, which would be any China before 1949. That was also a contagion and all needed to be erased and wiped out. And the boogeyman in China at that time was America. 

I'm finding that these books have actually convinced me that American social rot is very serious and you're seeing here a tie between like, biological or viral contagion in COVID-19 and then these social contagions of drug abuse, despair, digital addiction. So they have convinced me that these problems are severe in American society. 

Have they convinced me that China's the boogeyman? I don't think so. I think as a society itself, we have to look within. Now, would we like to cooperate in China and deal with these issues together? Because China deals with similar issues as we've noted, we're similar societies. I think that would be a compelling argument, but no, I don't think I'm gonna be writing any screeds about Chinese foreign exchange students coming to your local mall and blowing you to smithereens. 

Or drinking chicken blood. 

If they are I’d love to be invited. 

These books are all certainly contagious. Thank you so much Alexander for coming on the podcast.

Thank you, Alec. And I don't know if I can forgive you for making me read all these things

You'll heal.

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