Chinese Defector?

One of the aggregators has a headline that eventually traces back to a story at the RedState blog saying it's "confirmed" that a high-level Chinese counterintelligence official, Dong Zingwei, defected this past February and in part provided information that COVID was in fact a lab leak. It's no coincidence that the still from Topaz above has a big mirror overshadowing the scene, and neither legacy nor most of independent media seems willing to cover the story, so it is what it is.

This is actually the third supposed Chinese "defector" in recent months, the other two being Yan Limeng and Wang Liqiang. RedState has been the main reporter on these as well.

The RedState report on Dong says,

RedState’s sources confirmed that the defector is, in fact, Dong, that he was in charge of counterintelligence efforts in China, and that he flew to the United States in mid-February, allegedly to visit his daughter at a university in California. When Dong landed in California he contacted DIA officials and told them about his plans to defect and the information he’d brought with him. Dong then “hid in plain sight” for about two weeks before disappearing into DIA custody.

One of the strongest arguments for the authenticity of the Dong story is the sudden reversal of the received narrative on COVID's origin. As Victor Davis Hanson noted this week,

For over a year, the American establishment and media borg have ostracized anyone who dared to connect the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic with the Chinese military-sponsored, level-4 biosafety Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Then, suddenly and without apologies for their past demagoguery, “journalists” and “experts” concede that the nearby Wuhan lab may well be the most likely genesis.

Why the abrupt change?

It's also worth noting that the received version of Yan Limeng's story appears to have been overtaken by events. Her Wikipedia entry pretty clearly dates from before the Great Revision:

Li-Meng Yan or Yan Limeng (simplified Chinese: 闫丽梦; traditional Chinese: 閆麗夢) is a Chinese virologist, known for publications and interviews alleging that SARS-CoV-2 was made in a Chinese government laboratory. These publications have been widely criticised by the scientific community.

. . . Since around February 2020, conspiracy theories as to the origin of SARS-CoV-2 have circulated on cable news and social media, including the idea that it had been manufactured in a laboratory.[15] This hypothesis was rejected by most scientists, who deem claims of laboratory origin to be implausible and lacking evidence. The laboratory leak idea may be related to political campaigns that utilize anti-Chinese sentiment and global geopolitical tensions.

Yan stated that evidence of genetic engineering was censored in scientific journals, allegedly as part of a conspiracy to suppress information on the topic. However, other scientists disputed the validity of the papers, pointing to poor methods, undisclosed funding from politically-motivated sources, the use of pseudonyms for the papers co-authors, and the paper having never been submitted to a journal for review. The papers were described by virologists as "non-scientific," "junk science," and written to spread "political propaganda."

The main takeaway I have from this story as it now stands is that control of the COVID narrative has been a high priority for the Chinese, and they've apparently now lost at least an initial skirmish, though they'd held the line for over a year. But US public figures like Dr Fauci and Peter Daszak had clearly been enabling the Chinese version for this entire period. We'll have to see whatever other shoes, if any, drop in coming weeks. But Boris Kusenov, the KGB defector in Topaz, certainly set important events in motion. This story has similar potential.