Biohacked: China's Race to Control Life

BIOHACKED

CHINA’S RACE TO CONTROL LIFE

Brandon J. Weichert

Foreword by Gordon G. Chang

New York • London

CONTENTS

Foreword: China’s Civilization-Killing Machine by Gordon G. Chang

Introduction: War Goes Microscopic

Chapter 1: Warfare Through Other Means

Chapter 2: Loose Lips (and COVID-19) Sink Ships

Chapter 3: Big Things Have Small Beginnings

Chapter 4: Of Pandemics and Censorship

Chapter 5: The True Origins of COVID-19

Chapter 6: Biological Terror: Made in China

Chapter 7: Gain-of-Function Tests

Chapter 8: Who Benefited from COVID-19?

Chapter 9: Biological 9/11

Chapter 10: From Winnipeg to Wuhan

Chapter 11: Tom Cotton Demands Answers About COVID-19

Chapter 12: Rand Paul Wants to Fire Fauci (With Good Reason)

Chapter 13: Eggheads

Chapter 14: Thousand Talents

Chapter 15: An Arrogant Academic or High-Tech Spy?

Chapter 16: China Steals US Government–Funded Cancer Research

Chapter 17: NIH, DARPA, and the CCP

Chapter 18: Knockin’ on All Under Heaven’s Door

Chapter 19: Don’t Go Down to Biolake

Chapter 20: China Creates Pig-Man (and Other Nightmares)

Chapter 21: Bionationalism vs. Bioglobalism

Chapter 22: Specific Genetic Attacks

Chapter 23: Biohacked!

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Notes

Index

FOREWORD

CHINA’S CIVILIZATION-KILLING MACHINE

GORDON G. CHANG¹

COVID-19 came out of the box ready to infect. So said Dr. Deborah Birx, President Trump’s coronavirus task force coordinator, to London’s Mail on Sunday in July 2022.

SARS-CoV-2, the pathogen causing this disease, was already more infectious than flu when it first arrived, Birx noted. Most viruses take years to become highly transmissible.

In laboratories you grow the virus in human cells, allowing it to adapt more, she told the paper. Each time it passes through human cells it becomes more adapted.

Every crime leaves a clue. Perhaps the most damning clue of China’s crime is the fast human transmission of SARS-CoV-2. Birx’s comment follows those of Alina Chan, a microbiologist at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, who angered the world’s scientific community in 2020 by arguing that the startling lack of mutations in SARS-CoV-2 was evidence that it had been developed in a lab. If there had been zoonotic transfers of the virus from animals to humans – the widely accepted theory at the time – there should have been evolutions of the pathogen as it adapted to humans. Surprisingly, there was an unusual stability of the virus despite trillions of replications.

There are other clues. The unnatural features of the virus suggest gene splicing: the irregular arrangements of amino acids and the much-discussed furin cleavage site, for instance. Additionally, no one has found the natural reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 or been able to document the transmission links as it supposedly made its way from creatures to humans. Most tellingly, the Chinese regime from the beginning of the outbreak to today has gone to great lengths, including destroying samples and other evidence, to hinder the international community from investigating the origins of the disease.

There is only one conclusion fitting the facts: SARS-CoV-2 was manufactured in a Chinese facility.

Bill Gates, who has become a health campaigner of sorts, in 2022 said another great disease is on the way, and he talked about bioterrorism as a possible cause. Gates is right to be concerned because the Chinese state has already unleashed a biological weapon that has killed millions outside China.

Even if SARS-CoV-2 was the result of a natural process, Chinese leaders turned it into a weapon. Since at least December 2019, China’s officials lied about the human-to-human transmissibility of the pathogen, telling the world it was not readily contagious when they knew it was highly so. Beijing propagated untruths through the statements of the World Health Organization and in China’s direct communications with the health authorities of other nations.

The Chinese, as we learned from public comments of Birx and others in 2020, in fact lulled countries into not taking precautions. In her March 31 press briefing that year, for example, she said that after seeing Chinese data she thought the novel coronavirus was no more serious than SARS, the 2002 outbreak in China that eventually killed fewer than 800 people worldwide. It was only after witnessing the devastation in Italy and Spain that Birx realized she had been misled. Dr. Anthony Fauci, who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has also publicly talked about being deceived by the Chinese.

Moreover, while Chinese leaders were locking down Wuhan and other cities – the lockdowns indicated they believed this tactic was effective in stopping transmission – they were pressuring other countries to accept arrivals from China without restriction or quarantine. The Communist Party had to know it was, with these actions, spreading the disease. This means the millions of deaths outside China were intentional – in other words, murder.

Is Chinese communism really that vicious?

The Communist Party uses the Soviet empirical framework called Comprehensive National Power to rank the strength of countries. China wants the No. 1 ranking, and there are two ways to obtain it: increase China’s power or decrease everybody else’s. And that’s what Chinese officials did: they used disease to weaken others once COVID-19 had infected China.

Chinese leaders are prepared to devastate all other societies. The country’s researchers even discuss bioweapons in public journals. China’s National Defense University, in the 2017 edition of the authoritative Science of Military Strategy, mentioned a new kind of biological warfare of specific ethnic genetic attacks. Beijing’s relentless efforts to collect genetic profiles of foreigners while preventing the transfer of the profiles of Chinese outside China is an indication of dark military intentions.

Can China actually develop such pathogens?

Technicians can now build a DNA weapon targeting a single individual, so weapons for specific ethnic groups must also be possible. In short, the next disease from China could leave Chinese people immune but sicken and kill everyone else. Call it the Communist Party’s civilization-killer.

Would China spread another disease so soon after COVID-19?

Xi Jinping, the bold Chinese ruler, knows he has just killed more than six million people outside China by deliberately spreading the disease beyond his borders.

The evidence of Chinese responsibility is clear, but the world refuses to admit that the Communist Party could be so malicious. For instance, the American intelligence community, as stated in the unclassified summary of its report delivered to President Biden in August 2021, could not come to a conclusion as to the source of the disease. The intelligence community, the summary stated, remains divided on the most likely origin of COVID-19.²

Biden has remained uncurious about a disease that had then killed hundreds of thousands of Americans, and he has dropped the matter even though the American toll has now crossed one million. Xi Jinping, therefore, knows he has suffered no penalty for killing Americans in great numbers. As a result, he undoubtedly sees no cost in spreading another disease, especially one that is targeted on the non-Chinese. It does not appear that any deterrence exists.

Analysts have often said that the first moments of a war with China will be fought in low-earth orbit, as both sides move to shoot down or disable the satellites of the other. Perhaps the war starts in outer space, but maybe it begins six months before, when China releases a virus that attacks only foreigners. After all, COVID-19 has been the proof-of-concept of the effectiveness of biological warfare. The disease has crippled – and continues to hobble – societies across the world.

China is a party to the Biological Weapons Convention, which prohibits signatories from developing and maintaining stocks of such weapons. But the Convention includes no inspections regime, which means the treaty will not stop the Communist Party.

The international community, assuming that COVID-19 was a natural occurrence, is still trying to cooperate with China to prevent another pandemic. Instead, countries should realize that the Chinese party-state manufactured and deliberately spread the disease. Governments, therefore, should be taking steps to deter the Chinese regime and building defenses against the next product of China’s biological weapons laboratories.

After all, COVID-19 came out of a box, ready not only to infect but also to kill.

INTRODUCTION

WAR GOES MICROSCOPIC

The single greatest threat to the United States today is not nuclear weapons or terrorism. It isn’t even cyberwarfare or foreign attacks on our democracy. The primary threat America faces today comes from the biotech sector in the People’s Republic of China. Only in the biotechnology space could one capture and manipulate the very building blocks of life to destroy one’s enemies.

That same technology could also be used to genetically enhance the people of the country that the technology is being used in, like in some bad science fiction film. This is particularly true if, as in the case of China, this takes place in an unregulated and opaque system, where so much biotechnology research and development is being done. And let’s not even get into (yet) the dangers that improperly regulated experimental biotech R&D pose to the world in the form of major accidents that could fundamentally upend the global order and economy, as the novel coronavirus from Wuhan, China, did in late 2019.

Using a technology called CRISPR, geneticists have the capability to identify, chart, and edit the genes that construct our very bodies. Over time, this technology can be developed into a potentially Earth-shattering offensive strategic weapon. This is especially true as the rising People’s Republic of China races forward with its national development. More dangerously, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China with an iron fist, has no history of respecting the value of the individual, or that of human life in general.

Over the course of this book, you will see how the character of the Chinese regime influences every aspect of its country’s development. By understanding that China is one of the most prolific human rights violators in the world, that the Chinese regime is the very embodiment of might makes right, you will understand just how dangerous allowing this regime to develop the advanced tools needed to dominate the biotech industry is for the rest of the world. The CCP is a regime that has subjugated Evangelical Christians. This is a group that is in the process of colonizing Tibet by sending ethnic Han to the occupied territory in an effort to make the Tibetans a minority in their own land. The CCP is currently in the process of ethnically cleansing the Muslim Uighurs from the Xinjiang Province.

Meanwhile, this regime systematically represses the democratic people of Hong Kong.¹ Dotting China is a vast network of slave-labor camps – known as Laogai prisons – wherein political prisoners are made to work.² Falun Gong prisoners are routinely executed on trumped up charges so that Chinese authorities can harvest their organs and sell them on the black market.³ The CCP uses its immense wealth and power quite literally to spy on every single one of its citizens with nationwide closed-circuit camera systems.⁴ It denies its people the ability to access all of the worldwide web, out of fear that foreign ideas will foment a revolt against the CCP’s totalitarian rule.⁵

Until 2014, also, there was a decades-long state-enforced one-child policy that led to the infanticide of millions of unborn children. Needless to say, this is a regime that should not be trusted with the power it already wields. Allowing the CCP to conduct untrammeled biotechnology research and development is only asking for trouble.

The biotech battle between China and the United States is not merely confined to the realm of scientific research. It crosses a multitude of fields and plays out in unpredictable, downright dangerous ways. For instance, the biotech battle is fought in the arena of intellectual property (IP) law. China is a persistent and flagrant violator of international IP laws.

China is a country that one in five US corporations accuse of having stolen their intellectual property at some point in the last decade. According to the 2017 report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, Chinese theft of American IP costs anywhere between $250 billion to $600 billion annually.⁶ In every sector, from manufacturing to computers to biotech, China has stolen a treasure trove of proprietary data, all in an effort to compete with the Americans and to leapfrog US companies in the great race for world technological dominance.

China’s biotech battle with the United States also plays out in the international business domain. Not only have Chinese spies stolen IP from American companies, but, paradoxically, American businesses and entrepreneurs have entered into partnerships with Chinese firms. Even as the US and Chinese governments tussle with each other at the geopolitical level, the business and academic communities of the two rivals cooperate with each other on a routine basis. What’s more, as you will see, the US government assists the Chinese government in sensitive biotech R&D projects!

During the Cold War, America’s private sector was very often the silver bullet to overcoming the centrally planned leviathan of the Soviet Union. In today’s new cold war, America’s private sector routinely cooperates with China. In their exchanges, Chinese firms (and therefore the Chinese government) learn about innovative new business practices and proprietary research from Americans that these Chinese firms then incorporate into their own products. With knowledge gleaned from their American counterparts, the Chinese firms then create products that are meant to empower China at the expense of the United States.

China has targeted American academia for exploitation. Given that biotechnology is part of the knowledge-based economy, academic research plays a large role in developing new products for this industry to sell. In recent days, there have been various reports of extensive Chinese efforts to steal proprietary research from American and Canadian firms or publicly funded research institutes.

In some cases, as you will see in future chapters, American research institutions have happily shared information with their Chinese counterparts, only to then be undercut by those same Chinese labs. In fact, several Chinese researchers have been sent to the United States to receive US taxpayer–funded research grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Once they receive NIH grants, the Chinese scientists then gain access to proprietary research data, steal that data, and send it back to their labs in China.⁷ Since 2015, Chinese industrial espionage directed against the biotech sector has been concentrated on stealing data regarding coronavirus, cancer, HIV, and Ebola research.

More dangerously, China has successfully targeted American researchers, offering those researchers money and prestige in China (far more than what they often get in the West), resulting in a reverse brain-drain of talent and knowledge bleeding from the United States into China.⁸ All of this plays well into China’s attempts to create an indigenous base for high-end biotechnology research and development. As its indigenous biotech capacity increases, so too does interest from foreign venture capitalist firms and foreign biotech firms.

China’s autocratic president, Xi Jinping, identified biotechnology as one of seven major tech industries that China had to dominate in order to control the battlefield of the twenty-first century. Chinese generals have written extensively over the last few years about the offensive capabilities that CRISPR would give their forces. Notably, China’s military leaders have highlighted how biotechnology could allow China’s forces to conduct specific ethnic genetic attacks on individuals and groups with whom they disagree.

Other Chinese militarists have spoken about how the country that rises to dominate biotechnology first will have exclusive access to essential biomaterials and even brain control weapons.⁹ What’s more, under President Xi’s rule, the entirety of the Chinese biotechnology sector has been reorganized to allow for the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the military arm of the totalitarian CCP, to enjoy greater access to and control of China’s budding biotech sector.¹⁰ President Xi is believed to have authorized the funding of direct Chinese military biotechnology development on the tune of $1 billion per year. And the PLA has overseen experiments using CRISPR to augment the genes of select soldiers among their ranks – a process known as gene doping – in an attempt to create genetically enhanced super-soldiers.

In fact, there were concerns for the security of the DNA of athletes participating in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.¹¹ Fears abounded that China would demand samples from these top physical specimens, as part of its COVID prevention protocols and use that as a backdoor way to gain access to desirable genetic traits that it could conceivably use in its military gene-doping program. This might sound ludicrous, but gene-doping – hacking human biology for strategic or economic gain – is the wave of the future, and the Chinese are at the bleeding edge.

Unlike here in the United States, where there is a degree of separation between our military and the scientific sector, the state and indigenous private industry in China have fused. Yes, there are technically private corporations and research institutes in China. But these groups are almost always staffed by or receive funding from Chinese military and Communist Party groups. The purportedly private biotechnology sector in China has exploded. Whereas five years ago, biotech research and development in China received funding from venture capital (VC) of around $1 billion per year, today China’s biotech sector receives VC investment on the order of $12 billion per year.¹²

That figure is expected to increase as both interest and capabilities in China’s biotech sector increase. This is especially true in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Because of the pandemic and the race to find a cure, biotech has secured itself as a massive growth industry that is highly attractive to investors.

Also, unlike in the United States, the Chinese biotech sector is a relatively unregulated space. Experiments involving the successful cloning of monkeys, dogs, and horses have occurred in China over the last few years.¹³ Chinese researchers have also managed to create chimera animals, such as pig-monkey hybrids.¹⁴ All of these actions have been taken to further the capability for science eventually to clone both human organs and, potentially, entire human beings.

Many medical researchers in the West applaud – and even assist – China in these activities. Since the biotech industry in the United States is regulated far more than its counterpart in China, Western scientists, investors, and entrepreneurs are flocking to China’s growing biotech sector because of its deregulated environment. In this environment of freewheeling deregulation, American innovators can work in tandem with Chinese researchers and firms to develop cancer vaccines, Ebola treatments, and HIV drugs. They also conduct unchecked genetic experimentation with CRISPR while yearning for the day when they can successfully clone human organs to be used on the international organ transplant market.

All of these things could unequivocally enhance human health everywhere. Given that the research is being conducted alongside Chinese state entities, however, you can be certain that there will be many more negative impacts on human existence. After all, as the Chinese military has made clear, the biotech industry offers significant strategic offensive capabilities to whichever country captures it first.

As I have written elsewhere, China has embraced the Field of Dreams mentality. If China’s government builds the infrastructure needed to conduct high-tech R&D in China, the foreign researchers and investors will come.¹⁵ China has spent years developing the tools needed to seduce ambitious, ignorant, and greedy Westerners to do business in China.

We’ve seen this pattern play out in the manufacturing sector, we see it presently at play in the computer industry, and we are starting to see it in progress in the biotech field. Through its Thousand Talents program, the CCP has a concerted, well-funded project underway to lure America’s best and brightest to come to the competitive, freewheeling, leap-without-looking high-tech R&D sectors of China.¹⁶ The Chinese have targeted American doctoral students enrolled in the nation’s top universities for co-option; they’ve wooed noted researchers such as Harvard’s Charles Lieber, who was recently convicted by the Department of Justice for lying to the FBI about his close financial ties to Chinese research labs. The list goes on.¹⁷

China is awash in cash, and its spies have no problem throwing money around to win the cooperation and trust of unwitting (or immoral) American researchers. As the Chinese artificial intelligence researcher and high-tech venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee wrote recently of Chinese entrepreneurs,

They live in a world where speed is essential, copying is an accepted practice, and competitors will stop at nothing to win a new market. Every day spent in China’s startup scene is a trial by fire, like a day spent as a gladiator in the Coliseum. The battles are life or death, and your opponents have no scruples.… The only way to survive this battle is to constantly improve one’s product but also to innovate your business model and build a moat around your company. If one’s only edge is a single novel idea, that idea will invariably be copied, your key employees will be poached, and you’ll be driven out of business by VC-subsidized competitors.… The messy markets and dirty tricks of China’s copycat era produced some questionable companies, but they also incubated a generation of the world’s most nimble, savvy, and nose-to-the-grindstone entrepreneurs.¹⁸

So, you see, the copying of intellectual property and the race to the top of the tech industry is not merely something the Chinese do against the Americans. It starts much closer to home, in China’s domestic market, and proliferates out from there. How can we expect such a rambunctious – rapacious – Chinese industry and government to treat our firms and intellectual property any different than they treat themselves? Apply Kai Fu-Lee’s observation specifically to the biotech sector and one should be put on the defensive. China has our number.

As a geopolitical analyst specializing in the interaction of new technologies with international relations (what some have come to call geotechnology analysis), I’ve spent years studying biotechnology research and its national security implications. What’s more, I am married to a nurse scientist who previously worked in genetics at the NIH. Biotechnology has been an ever-present factor in my professional and personal life. In fact, since 2018, I’ve covered the biotech beat for American Greatness. I was warning about the threat that China’s ambitious biotech program posed to the world well before the COVID-19 pandemic.

With CRISPR-Cas-9, Chinese geneticists can gene edit whatever they want. In one instance, a pair of HIV–infected twin girls were the subject of gene editing experiments while they were still in their mother’s womb. The object of the experiment was to remove a specific gene in the twins’ DNA that would prevent them from being infected with HIV.

By conducting the tests in utero, the Chinese scientist who conducted the experiment, He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, ensured that the twins’ relative immunity to HIV would be passed on to their children (the twins’ parents were HIV positive).¹⁹ The children were born healthy in 2018. Subsequent tests on the children have indicated that the specific gene that made them susceptible to HIV was removed, but those gene edits caused further mutations in their DNA. In fact, the children