Chris Lange, FISM News
The U.S. has placed China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and 11 affiliated biotechnology research institutes on a trade blacklist for using emerging biotechnology to create “brain-control” weapons which officials say pose a serious national security threat.
The U.S. Commerce Department made the announcement in a Dec. 16 press release, stating, “Today, the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) took action to address the ongoing threats to U.S. national security and foreign policy presented by the People’s Republic of China (PRC)’s efforts to develop and deploy biotechnology and other technologies for military applications and human rights abuses.” The Department cited evidence that the communist nation is using “biotechnology processes to support Chinese military end uses and end users, to include purported brain-control weaponry.”
A senior U.S. official told The Financial Times that China has been using emerging biotechnologies to try to develop future military applications that include “gene editing, human performance enhancement [and] brain machine interfaces.”
Responding to intelligence reports on the matter, the Biden administration this month levied sanctions on 37 Chinese biotechnology companies that have been linked to such weaponry.
Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said Beijing is utilizing biotechnologies “to pursue control over its people and its repression of members of ethnic and religious minority groups,” according to reporting by Reuters.
“We cannot allow U.S. commodities, technologies, and software that support medical science and biotechnical innovation to be diverted toward uses contrary to U.S. national security,” she said in a statement.
Fox News National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin explained that the technology “could allow a Chinese commando to discharge a weapon with just a thought, not a trigger finger.”
“The Pentagon says Beijing already uses these technologies, including biometric surveillance tools and facial recognition, to track dissidents and journalists and to suppress the Uyghurs,” she said.
The Chinese embassy in Washington called the trade ban an “unwarranted suppression” that directly violates free trade rules, adding that Beijing plans to take “all essential measures” to protect the interests of Chinese companies and research institutions.
“China’s development of biotechnology has always been for the well-being of mankind. The relevant claims of the U.S. side are totally groundless,” embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu said in an email. Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin on Friday said China vigorously opposes the move and urged the U.S. to “rectify” its “mistaken ways.”
Growing tensions between the U.S. and China have ratcheted up significantly in recent weeks. The U.S. Treasury Department on Dec. 10 placed an investment ban on Chinese facial recognition company SenseTime. Two weeks later, President Biden signed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act into law, banning imports from China’s Xinjiang region over concerns about forced labor. More recently, the U.S. and Japan drew up plans for a joint emergency response in the event China attacks Taiwan amid Beijing’s escalating military aggression toward the self-ruled democratic island.