SEN TOM COTTON: Some things you just can’t say about China

In the earliest days of the coronavirus pandemic, before most Americans knew where Wuhan was, I had concluded that the Chinese Communist Party was lying—once again. In early 2020, China had reported an outbreak of pneumonia around Wuhan to the World Health Organization and claimed to have the outbreak under control. 

Yet the Chinese government continued draconian lockdowns and quarantines around Wuhan, built field hospitals from scratch, hoarded protective equipment like face masks and surgical gloves, and even operated crematoriums around the clock. Not exactly the actions of a government confident that it had the situation under control.

I used simple common sense, not scientific knowledge or classified intelligence, to answer the bell early on the Wuhan coronavirus. I’ve never taken the claims of Chinese Communists at face value. And when their actions contradicted their words and they started covering up important information about the outbreak, I knew they were up to no good.

A security person moves journalists away from the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China in December 2021. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

Yet when I made a few commonsense observations in those early days, you would’ve thought I had committed unpardonable sins based on the hysterical reactions not just from China, but also from its American apologists. At every turn, they tried to silence me and suppress my ideas.

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First, I advocated for a ban on travel from China into the United States. In phone calls and letters to Trump administration officials and in public statements, I urged this commonsense step; after all, China had already imposed its own travel ban from Wuhan. 

But Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, criticized the proposal as "culturally insensitive," and Joe Biden denounced the ban as the product of "hysteria, xenophobia, and fearmongering" after President Trump halted travel from China. 

Biden and Fauci both would later reverse course. What’s remarkable, though, isn’t that both men were wrong—they often are—but rather that their first instinct was to leap to Communist China’s defense and attack its critics. And it was far from an isolated incident.

"Seven Things You Can't Say About China" by Sen. Tom Cotton

Next, the Washington establishment rebuked me and others for calling the virus the "Wuhan coronavirus," "China virus," or "Wuhan flu." I’ve never understood the controversy. There’s a long history of naming pandemics and viruses after the locations of suspected origin. West Nile virus, Asian flu, Hong Kong flu, Ebola, and Zika are just a few examples.

But if this custom offends Communist China, outrage follows. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield called these terms "absolutely wrong and inappropriate." Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said they "make us all less safe," and Sen. Chuck Schumer called them "harsh, nasty, and bigoted." 

Major newspapers and news networks echoed the scolding. After he became president, Joe Biden banned government employees from using these geographically accurate terms. The double standard was clear, and once again, it benefited China.

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Finally, I became the first national leader to say one of the most unspeakable things about the pandemic: the virus may have escaped from a lab. Again, this commonsense observation shouldn’t have been controversial. Wuhan is home to China’s highest-risk "super lab," where researchers studied bat-based coronaviruses—a key researcher at the lab was literally nicknamed "the Bat Lady." 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer during a news conference in the U.S. Capitol Visitors Center on April 28, 2022. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Moreover, American officials had warned two years earlier about lax safety practices at the lab, which was woefully consistent with China’s long history of poor lab safety and lying about public-health crises.

Meanwhile, bats don’t live within 100 miles of Wuhan, and the Wuhan "wet market" didn’t sell either bats or pangolins, which Chinese Communists had fingered as the culprit. Not surprisingly, a very early report by Chinese scientists found that the first known cases had not had contact with the market. In short, all the evidence from the beginning pointed to a lab leak.

Of course, Chinese Communist officials denounced me. China’s ambassador to the United States condemned me as "absolutely crazy." He lectured that "it’s very harmful, it’s very dangerous to stir up suspicion, rumors and spread them among the people." For good measure, he disingenuously added that the theory would instigate "racial discrimination" and "xenophobia." 

Likewise, a top researcher at the Wuhan lab—also the secretary of the lab’s Communist Party committee—huffed that I was "deliberately trying to mislead people." I expected nothing less from Chinese Communists. 

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But the howls of indignation were just as bad from America’s elite, especially in the media. The Washington Post, the New York Times, NBC, CNN, MSNBC, and twenty-seven scientists in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet all condemned the lab-leak hypothesis as a "conspiracy theory." 

The Huffington Post ran a pair of articles titled "Don’t Listen to Sen. Tom Cotton About Coronavirus" and "Sen. Tom Cotton Still Pitching Debunked Theory About Coronavirus." NPR declared that "virus researchers say there is virtually no chance that the new coronavirus was released as [a] result of a laboratory accident in China or anywhere else."

In their rush to attack and silence me, China’s apologists threw caution, curiosity and basic facts to the wind—which they’ve slowly and grudgingly come to acknowledge. About a year later, the Washington Post quietly edited its article titled "Tom Cotton Keeps Repeating a Coronavirus Conspiracy Theory That Was Already Debunked," replacing "Conspiracy" and "Debunked" with, respectively, "Fringe" and "Disputed." Other news outlets added editor’s notes to their articles and published soul-searching examinations about how the media had gotten the story so wrong. 

By 2023, the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and a former CDC director announced that they, too, suspected the pandemic had started in a lab; the Central Intelligence Agency would join them two years later. In 2024, even the New York Times published an article titled "Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points."

The Chinese Communist Party never came around, though. I continued to speak the truth about Communist China and hold it accountable in the Senate. In August 2020, China responded by imposing sanctions on me, which I still wear as a badge of honor.

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These scenes from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic reveal some broader truths about China. First, the Chinese Communist Party lies, routinely and constantly. No surprise there; Chinese Communists aren’t much different from Russian Communists, who lied throughout the Cold War. 

But second, Communist China can reliably depend on a wide array of American apologists to defend it, far more than Soviet Russia could ever count on. These shills are everywhere: business, politics, media, Hollywood, professional sports, universities and beyond. Third and most troubling, they don’t just defend China, but also attack and try to silence its critics.

And they often succeed. Although more than three-quarters of Americans have a (justly) unfavorable view of China, they still don’t often hear the full case for the crimes and wickedness of the Chinese Communist Party. China has cowed many of America’s elites, celebrities, athletes and politicians into silence. They fear losing jobs, contracts, investors, status and worse. Better to stay silent.

These fears affect millions of normal Americans, too. If I had been a private citizen and said the same things about China that I did as a senator, my employer would’ve probably told me to cut it out and would’ve fired me if I didn’t. Social media might have silenced me as well. After all, Chinese sympathizers have ruined the careers and livelihoods of many Americans for far less, provoking fear and silence across our country.

The dangerous reality is that there are some things you just can’t say about China.

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Excerpted from "Seven Things You Can’t Say About China" by Tom Cotton. Copyright 2025 by Thomas B. Cotton. Published with permission from Broadside Books and HarperCollins Publishers.

Republican Tom Cotton represents Arkansas in the United States Senate. He is the author of the forthcoming book, "Only the Strong" which will be published by Twelve on November 1, 2022.