No citation, but If you think about it it makes sense: is you have no fat left, and aren't ingesting enough calories, your body would rather burn muscle than organs.
You are more likely to hold accurate beliefs about the world by deferring to experts. Its not a guarantee but it works well. Treating heterodox ideas as valuable simply by virtue of being heterodox is a much worse epistemological model than trusting academic consensus.
You would have to be adding that either US intelligence ops are so much more talented than Chinese ops, or that China is so much more principled than the US. Neither of which strike me as accurate.
If the US is doing it, China is at least TRYING to do it.