After Biden’s meeting with Xi, the White House lifted sanctions on the Ministry of Public Security’s Institute of Forensic Science, essentially the biggest network of labs for China’s national police. The U.S. government had imposed sanctions on the institute in 2020, describing it as “complicit in human rights violations and abuses committed in China’s campaign of repression, mass arbitrary detention, forced labor and high-technology surveillance.” Now it has removed those restrictions.
Officials admit this was the concession Beijing demanded from Biden in exchange for fresh promises to crack down on Chinese exports of fentanyl precursor chemicals to the United States. The administration has presented no evidence that the institute’s abuses have ceased. In fact, China’s mass DNA collection efforts are only expanding. Now, Chinese authorities are using mass DNA collection to build the world’s largest DNA data set — which it intends to use against all of its opponents, internal and abroad — with Americans caught up in the net.
While lots of countries are building DNA databases for law enforcement purposes, the Chinese government’s plans go well beyond policing. Expert studies have documented how Beijing is using this data to refine its mass surveillance and social-control campaigns, especially against ethnic minorities.
“The way DNA databases are deployed in China is not aligned with the basic principles of how you would balance law enforcement and human rights concerns,” Yves Moreau, professor of engineering at the University of Leuven in Belgium, told me. “In China, it is out of control.”
The U.S. government’s needed response to this threat begins at home, because Chinese companies involved in these alleged abuses also operate in the United States. For example, the BGI Group, a Chinese conglomerate, makes DNA test kits and other biotechnology consumer products used widely in the United States and Europe. BGI is also helping the Chinese government build one of the world’s largest genetic databases. The company has been accused of abusing its access to medical data of people in several countries through its genetic screening kits and coronavirus tests.
Last year, the Pentagon named BGI Genomics a “Chinese military company” of concern that operates inside the United States. In March, the Commerce Department placed three BGI Group subsidiaries in China on a trade blacklist, saying that “collection and analysis of genetic data present a significant risk of diversion to China’s military programs,” a reference to China’s bioweapons research. (The company denies that it has abused customer data and denies that its products are used for military purposes.)
Despite all this, Senate Democrats last month blocked a provision from the House’s version of the National Defense Authorization Act that would have barred U.S. government agencies from working with “adversarial biotech companies,” including BGI. In recent months, BGI spent hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring D.C. lobbyists to influence this outcome.
The U.S. failure to confront China’s abuse of mass DNA collection both in China and the United States amounts to a green light for the Chinese government and any U.S. companies that want to help it. But U.S. firms should remember that Chinese authorities respect no geographical or ethical boundaries in how they use a person’s DNA once they have it.
“Mass DNA collection is part of a broader system of social controls that is being imposed on particular communities in China but also on Chinese people in other countries,” said Emile Dirks, research associate at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. “To remove it as a transactional measure sends a signal that the U.S. concern about this issue is limited.”
It would be nice if science could become an area of U.S.-China relations that both sides could see as ripe for mutually beneficial cooperation. Unfortunately, Beijing sees biotech as a key element of its military-civil fusion strategy and an instrument for extending its long arm of repression.
Even if China fulfills its side of the deal by cracking down on fentanyl precursors, ignoring Beijing’s biotech abuses in exchange sets a terrible precedent. Unless we acknowledge that human rights in China and U.S. national security are closely linked, Beijing will succeed in undermining both.
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