Share

Where is Dong Jingwei?

Widespread rumors that China's top counterintelligence official had defected to the United States last February reached a fever pitch over the weekend, propelled largely by unfounded reports in anticommunist and pro-Trump circles that Dong had brought with him evidence that the Covid-19 pandemic had originated in a leak from a virology lab in Wuhan, not from an animal source.

The Wuhan lab leak theory has not been proven. The vast majority of researchers  believes the virus leapt from an infected animal to a person, probably via Wuhan’s “wet market,” where both live and butchered meat is sold, but definitive evidence has yet to be found. The controversy has been further exacerbated by Chinese secrecy, which has aided the campaign by pro-Taiwan and Donald Trump allies to deflect blame for the spread of the pandemic away from the former president and onto Beijing. 

The magnitude of the rumors about the supposed flight of Dong, 57, the number two official in the Minis…