China DNA-spies on citizens

Gets blood from 700M men, boys

China’s Communist government is reportedly collecting blood samples from 700 million men and boys to augment its massive surveillance operation targeting the country’s citizens.

Police have fanned out across the country since late 2017 to collect enough samples to build a huge DNA database, according to a study released Wednesday by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, The New York Times reported.

The database would enable authorities from the 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, Thermo Fisher Scientific, based in Waltham, Mass., 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.

Thermo Fisher 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 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.

The database would also enhance the country’s already sophisticated surveillance operation, which includes cameras, facial recognition and artificial intelligence, to clamp down on anti-government activity.

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.

“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.

China already has the world’s largest collection of genetic material, totaling 80 million profiles, according to state media.