> China Spins Tale That the U.S. Army Started the Coronavirus Epidemic: After criticizing American officials for politicizing the pandemic, Chinese officials and news outlets have floated unfounded theories that the United States was the source of the virus.

That's the headline of this story from March 13: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...

They have been telling their own people source of the virus is the US:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/13/world/asia/coronavirus-ch...

One under director of the Foreign Affairs office posted it on Twitter, a site blocked in China. By this logic, the US is also telling their own people that the virus is a biological weapon because one senator said it on Fox News.

"Mr. Zhao’s remarks were spread on China’s most prominent social media platform, Weibo, under a hashtag: #ZhaoLijianPostedFiveTweetsinaRowQuestioningAmerica. By late afternoon on Friday, that hashtag had been viewed more than 160 million times, along with screenshots of the original Twitter posts."

Do you find the US government responsible for a conspiracy theory being popular on social media?

Did a US official start it on a platform controlled by the US... then yeah maybe.

They certainly brought it to prominence:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-13/chinese-o...

My uneducated guess is that it's the western internet getting into a fit over what was essentially a Twitter fight between officials.

Related to that and some other stories about evil China - if China treated certain politician's Twitter feeds or Fox News articles as seriously as the West seems to treat China's equivalents, North America would probably be glassed by now.

The Chinese media spread the rumor, and they are an extension of the Chinese government. Whether they started the rumor is immaterial.

s/Chinese media/Fox News/, s/Chinese government/US government/, and see if this sentence still makes sense.