Civilized nations are bound to obey the law of war embodied in the Geneva Conventions. The Conventions outlaw acts such as the intentional targeting of civilian populations and the creation and stockpiling of biological weapons. Despite those obligations, China is evidently eager to violate the Conventions because of opportunities presented by the advance of medical science.
At least since the 2002 publication of “Unrestricted Warfare,” a book by two People’s Liberation Army (PLA) colonels, Chinese military thinking has extended the concept of a battlefield to every aspect of military and civilian existence. The unlimited “battlefield” now means that China intends to include biological warfare among the most significant means of fighting a war.
From several news reports beginning in 2019 we know of a 2010 book called, “War for Biological Dominance,” by a professor at China’s Third Military Medical University, which emphasized the use of biological warfare. The theoretical basis continued in a 2015 essay by Gen. He Fuchu (then-president of China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences) in which he argued that biotechnology will become the new “strategic commanding heights” of national defense, from biomaterials to “brain control” weapons.
Theory was made into doctrine in the 2017 edition of a PLA National Defense University textbook which debuted a section about biology as a domain of military struggle, mentioning the potential for new kinds of biological warfare to include “specific ethnic genetic attacks.”
China is evidently eager to violate its obligations under the Biological Weapons Convention, part of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the development and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons.
China has reportedly begun using genomic science — the study of DNA “profiles” of individuals and ethnic groups — to identify its Uighur Muslim population, which is being severely oppressed. It has also created a national “gene bank,” intending to make it the world’s largest depository of genomic data.
Read more: Biological Warfare: China Already Collects DNA Profiles Of Americans
