ANALYSIS: US Defense Report Identifies Communist China as Primary Bioweapon Threat

Medical personnel move a deceased patient to a refrigerated truck serving as a make shift morgue, at Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York City, on April 9, 2020. (Angela Weiss/ AFP via Getty Images)

A U.S. Department of Defense report has outlined the nation’s strategy to meet the challenges posed by biological threats.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a notice barring the Wuhan Institute of Virology from federal funding for 10 years over its gain-of-function experiments.

That notice came as House Republicans pushed HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra to comply with a congressional investigation into COVID-19 origins. Meanwhile, the UK confirmed Monday that its upcoming global summit on artificial intelligence would focus on the potential for AI to create bioweapons, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunk warned of a “small window” to address the threat.

Defense analysts continue to discuss the 2023 Biodefense Posture Review (pdf), published last month by the U.S. Department of Defense. The report is a comprehensive document that outlines the nation’s strategic preparedness against potential biosecurity threats.

The report’s release comes on the heels of over two decades of threats from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regarding the potential use of biotechnology as a form of “unrestricted warfare” against Western nations. It addresses the aftermath of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, which resulted in millions of fatalities globally.

Just a few weeks prior to the report’s Aug. 17 release, the Defense Department announced it would invest an additional $300 million per year over the next five years to guard against known and emerging biological threats. That investment comes on top of approximately $1.4 billion appropriated in 2022 for chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear defenses, according to an article in National Defense magazine.

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Deb Rosenblum, assistant secretary of defense for nuclear, chemical, and biological programs, made the announcement on July 28, warning about “bio-convergence”—the joining of biological sciences with emerging technologies.

China: a ‘Pacing Challenge’

The Biodefense Posture Review calls China the “pacing challenge” for the Department of Defense, followed by Russia, North Korea, Iran, and unnamed “violent extremist organizations.”

It notes that the National Defense Strategy, released in 2022, “provides a vision for focusing the DoD on our pacing challenge”—namely, a competitor making significant progress toward challenging U.S. defense—“even as we manage the other threats of a rapidly changing world.”

The Biodefense Posture Review specified four goals that the Defense Department must prioritize before 2035 to defend against biological threats:

1. Defend the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC);

2. Deter strategic attacks against the United States and its allies and partners;

3. Deter aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary—prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific region, then the Russia challenge in Europe;

4. Build a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem.

Of these four priority targets, threats come mainly from two regimes: the CCP and Russia, with the CCP being named twice and Russia once.

Fervor for Unrestricted Warfare

The report notes that Chinese publications “have called biology a new domain of war.”

In the 1990s, the Chinese military introduced the concept of unrestricted warfare, a form of total war that transcends military boundaries and is ready to employ all available technologies.

Two People’s Liberation Army (PLA) colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, set out the framework and tactics of this approach in their 1999 book “Unrestricted Warfare.” They included biochemical weapons as part of their strategy for a “revolution in war.”

Biological warfare, in essence, embodies all the features of unrestricted warfare, in which the first rule is that “there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.”

More than a decade after the book’s publication, a 2010 book titled “War for Biological Dominance” stressed the impact of biology on future warfare. The book was authored by Guo Jiwei, a professor and chief physician at the PLA’s Third Military Medical University, and author of a 2006 article in the PLA Journal of Military Medicine entitled “The Command of Biotechnology and Merciful Conquest in Military Opposition.”

China’s state-run media continued to fervently advocate unrestricted warfare over the next decade.

On Jan. 23, 2014, China National Defense News published an article titled “Genetic Warfare Will Fundamentally Transform Human Warfare.”

“Genetic weapons can be used in a variety of ways,” the article said. “Through humans, aircraft, missiles, or artillery, one can put genetically engineered bacteria, bacterial insects, and microorganisms with disease-causing genes into the major rivers, cities, or major transportation arteries of other countries, so that the microorganisms such as viruses can spread and multiply naturally, thus causing people and animals to suffer from an untreatable disease in a short period of time.”

For the author of this article, the mass killing or injuring of innocent civilians was not an apparent matter of concern.

“Moreover, genetic weapons can use gene editing techniques according to specific needs. For example, we can insert genes that cause human mental damage into some organisms. If people of a certain ethnic group are infected with these intelligence-impairing genes, they will lose their normal intellectual ability,” he wrote.

The Invisible Battlefield

On Nov. 10, 2017, the PLA Daily published an op-ed titled “How Genetic Weapons Will Affect Future Warfare,“ describing the ”invisible battlefield” of the future:

“One side may use genetic weapons before the war, causing the destruction of the other party’s personnel and living environment, leading to the destruction of a nation, as the whole nation loses its combat effectiveness and is conquered without bloodshed ... The future battlefield will become an invisible battlefield.”

The following year, the authors of an article published online on China Military—the English language news website of the PLA— explained that by taking advantage of the genetic differences between various races, genetic weapons can kill or incapacitate a targeted group of people, while sparing the unspecified group of people from harm.

“Studies have shown that 99.7 percent to 99.9 percent of human DNA is the same, and the small differences are the key to distinguishing various races. Therefore, each nation and race has a unique genetic profile, based on which, theoretically, genetic weapons can be developed to selectively target specific racial genes, thereby killing or injuring a specific race,” the article said.

The article pointed out the practical aspect of “using $50 million to build a genetic weapons arsenal” that “will have far more lethality than a nuclear weapons arsenal costing $100 billion to build.”

Chinese leader Xi Jinping famously said in 2020, “The East is rising and the West is declining.” This narrative became the backdrop for a new kind of assertive and confrontational “wolf warrior diplomacy.” Echoing this were hawkish discussions of biological warfare in Chinese state media and military publications, raising concerns in the U.S. government.

WIV’s Ties to Chinese Military

The Biodefense Posture Review repeatedly cites the dual-use nature of biotechnology—its potential for both licit and illicit purposes—both in the military and civilian sectors.

Notably, the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a possible origin of the novel coronavirus, is a typical military-civilian fusion research institute.

A Jan. 15, 2021 factsheet released by the U.S. State Department stated, “Despite the WIV presenting itself as a civilian institution, the United States has determined that the WIV has collaborated on publications and secret projects with China’s military. The WIV has engaged in classified research, including laboratory animal experiments, on behalf of the Chinese military since at least 2017.”

In May 2021, former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated in an interview with Fox News that the institute was engaged in military activity alongside its civilian research.

“What I can say for sure is this: we know that they were engaged in efforts that were connected to the People’s Liberation Army inside of that laboratory, so military activity being performed alongside what they claimed was just good old civilian research,” he said.

A look back at the very beginnings of the pandemic is significant. On Jan. 25, 2020, less than two days after Wuhan was locked down, a PLA biological warfare expert, Major Gen. Chen Wei, led a team to Wuhan to take charge of the institute. Officially, Gen. Chen was dispatched to Wuhan to create a vaccine to counter the COVID-19 virus, which her team did—with remarkable speed.

However, experts say that Gen. Chen’s presence at the Wuhan Institute confirms the link between the Wuhan lab and the Chinese military.

A joint investigative report by Pro-Publica and Vanity Fair magazine, published in October 2022, cited experts who said the speed with which Gen. Chen’s team developed a vaccine was “unrealistic, if not impossible.”

The lab “must have had access to the genomic sequence of the virus no later than in November 2019, weeks before China’s official recognition that the virus was circulating,” the unnamed experts said.

An anonymous insider told The Epoch Times in May 2023 that the biowarfare specialist’s presence at the WIV was definite evidence for a lab leak. The general was most likely sent to Wuhan to “clean up the mess,” he said.