The Chinese Party-State doesn’t only collect, analyze, and store the DNA of its own citizens, it collects the DNA of peoples from around the world, including millions of Americans.
Every American should sit up and take notice. Your DNA—the biological blueprint according to which your body was constructed—can be used to identify you and only you among all the 7.5 billion people on the planet.
It may also reveal, to a determined and sophisticated genomic adversary, weaknesses that could be exploited by custom-designed bioweapons. Do we really want our innermost secrets and vulnerabilities to be exposed in this way to the digital dictatorship that rules China?
Beg, Borrow, or Steal
One example of how this works in practice involves gene sequencing colossus Beijing Genomics Institute, now known as BGI.To acquire state-of-the-art technology, BGI bought the U.S. sequencing company Complete Genomics, a purchase that gave the Chinese company access to a DNA database that contains the private genetic information of large numbers of Americans. Whatever privacy protocols may have been put in place by either company are worthless. All Chinese high-tech companies, whether they be state- or privately owned, are working hand in glove with the state.
The answer, of course, is “nothing.”
To supplement its massive domestic DNA collection program, the Chinese regime has become a major purchaser of gene sequencing equipment in recent years. U.S. companies such as Thermo Fisher Scientific based in Waltham, Massachusetts, boasted that China has been by far its hottest market in recent years.
The boasting stopped when much of the equipment it had sold to Chinese security services was revealed to have wound up in the region of Xinjiang, where Muslim minorities have been heavily persecuted. As reported in Part I of this report, large swathes of western China, some 36.5 million people in all, were reportedly forced to hand over DNA samples, as well as undergo retinal scans and fingerprinting, as part of a sweeping new surveillance and control program.
Beijing claims that the program is necessary to combat “extremism and terrorism.”
But its own actions have been so extreme—to date, an estimated 1 million Uyghur and Kazakh ethnic minorities have been sent to re-education camps—as to itself constitute a case of state-sponsored terrorism against a minority population.
Given the abuses associated with DNA collection in other parts of China, the company may want to consider expanding its sales ban to the entire country. It would not be difficult for Chinese authorities to bypass the ban on sales to Xinjiang by simply ordering them for a neighboring province, and then transshipping them to their final destination.
Thermo Fisher’s actions, however limited, were undertaken voluntarily in response to bad publicity. But the Trump administration should consider putting formal restrictions on the sales of U.S. biotechnology companies, technology, and even equipment to China.
At the same time that we work to protect the Chinese people from the misuse of American technology in places like Xinjiang, we also have to do a better job of protecting the genetic privacy of Americans. In fact, we may very well want to prohibit the testing of U.S. DNA in China, as well as the transfer of U.S. genomic information to that country.
As we will discuss in Part III, hospitals, clinics, and even commercial DNA testing companies in the United States now routinely send DNA samples to China to be analyzed.
In other words, we the people—unaware of the dangers—might turn out to be unwitting collaborators in China’s massive DNA collection program. But, as we will see, we are unlikely to be beneficiaries.