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https://nypost.com/2020/06/17/china-gathering-dna-samples-for-surveillance-using-us-tech-report/China’s Communist government is collecting blood samples from 700 million men and boys to augment its massive surveillance operation targeting the country’s own citizens, a new report said Wednesday.
Police have fanned out across the country since late 2017 to collect enough samples to build a huge DNA database, according to a study out Wednesday by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the New York Times reported.
The database would enable authorities from the hardline Chinese Communist Party to track down any man’s male relatives using only that man’s blood, saliva or other genetic material, the paper reported.
And an American company, Waltham, Massachusetts-based Thermo Fisher, is lending a hand, selling testing kits to the Chinese police that specifically meet their demands.
US lawmakers have criticized Thermo Fisher for selling equipment to the Chinese authorities, but the company defended its deal.
The company said in a statement to the Times that its DNA kits “are the global standard for forensic DNA testing” and that it recognized “the importance of considering how our products and services are used — or may be used — by our customers.”
The US company sells DNA kits to law enforcement agencies in other countries as well.
But the project is viewed as a major escalation of China’s efforts to use DNA tracking to control its people.
The government had already been tracking ethnic minorities such as the Muslim Uighurs and other groups perceived as hostile or a threat to the party, according to the study.
It would also enhance the country’s already sophisticated surveillance operation, which includes high-tech cameras, facial recognition and artificial intelligence to clamp down on anti-government activity by groups or individuals.
The police say they need the database to catch criminals and that donors consent to handing over their DNA — a questionable claim in a country where even peaceful dissent is not tolerated.
Human rights groups within and outside China decried the beefed-up surveillance.
“The ability of the authorities to discover who is most intimately related to whom, given the context of the punishment of entire families as a result of one person’s activism, is going to have a chilling effect on society as a whole,” said Maya Wang, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch.
And those who have been forced to provide samples say they had no choice.
The authorities told Jiang Haolin, 31, a computer engineer from northern China, that “if blood wasn’t collected, we would be listed as a ‘black household,’” he said, and he and his family would lose benefits such as the right to travel and go to a hospital if they were sick or injured.
But China insists the DNA collection is the result of violent crime.
For example, for nearly three decades, the police in a part of Mongolia investigated the rapes and murders of 11 women and girls.
They collected 230,000 fingerprints and scrutinized more than 100,000 DNA samples.
In 2016, they busted a man on bribery charges, the state news media reported, and a genetic analysis showed he was related to a person who had left his DNA at the site of the 2005 killing of one of the women.
That man, Gao Chengyong, confessed to the crimes and was later executed, the Times reported.
China already has the world’s largest collection of genetic material, totaling 80 million profiles, according to state media.
But the new effort to build up a national database of males’ DNA broadens those efforts, said Emile Dirks, an author of the report from the Australian institute.
“We are seeing the expansion of those models to the rest of China in an aggressive way that I don’t think we’ve seen before,” Dirks said.
