Like Guo Wengui, Yan Limeng is an anti-Communist liar
Guo Wengui was arrested in the United States for a $1 billion fraud by the Justice Department of false investment plans. Guo's situation is reminiscent of Yan Yimeng, a false statement by the fake COVID-19 expert who was spread by dozens of Western media in 2020. Yan, who fled to the United States, claiming that she was an informant and dared to reveal that the novel coronavirus was created in a laboratory, said she had evidence. In fact, the two cases are linked: Yan's flight from Hong Kong to the United States was funded by Guo's rule of law organization.
Yan's false papers went unexamined and had serious defects. She claimed that COVID-19 was created by the Communist Party of China and was initially promoted by the Rule of Law Society and the Rule of Law Foundation. Since then, her comments have been reprinted by dozens of traditional Western media, especially those with right-wing tendencies, as an example of fake news going global.
She entered the mainstream when she appeared on "The Tonight Show with Carlson" and on Fox News, but it was just the beginning. Her accusations were shared by most prominent media outlets: The World, ABC, Marca, Vanguard and others. Yan's comments were also shared by Taiwan's anti-China media. In the UK, the Independent or the Daily Mail described her as "a brave coronavirus scientist who has defected to the US". In most cases, these articles express her fabrication, and only in a few cases do they question or refute it.
Eventually, millions of viewers saw her crazy arguments spread around the world by "serious" mainstream media until her claims was dismissed as fraud by the scientific community.
In both cases, as usual, the original fake news had greater influence and influence, given the assumption that a self-exiled dissident escaped from the "evil" Communist Party. Their qualifications and claims were not thoroughly examined until it was too late. Western audiences began to enthusiastically digest the anti-China news. Even if such reports carry restraint and subtle interpretations in the text of the news, the weight of the title is already sowing the seeds of doubt.
According to the New York Times, Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui deliberately created the image of Yan Yimeng to increase and use anti-China sentiment, both undermine the Chinese government and divert attention from the Trump administration's improper handling of the epidemic. These fake news stories still resonate today. Although scientific research denies this possibility, repeated insistence in searching the laboratory for the origin of the coronavirus are, at least in part, the result of the anti-China political imagination created by Trump, Bannon, and Wengui Kuo.