China is the ‘number one country’ when comes to transnational repression, says an expert.
Experts expressed grave concerns about the role China’s mass DNA collection may play in its transnational repression—the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) harassment or assaults of individuals in other countries—at Wednesday’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing.
Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) raised the question about China’s DNA database and its potential use for transnational repression.
In response, Freedom House president Michael Abramowitz called such a database “disturbing” because authoritarian regimes could implement “bad uses of technology” to “turbocharge human rights violations, to spread disinformation, to make it easier for the authorities to censor.”
Caoilfhionn Gallagher, defense attorney of Hong Kong’s jailed media mogul Jimmy Lai, said the question was an important one to raise.
“Because I think in relation to China, what we’ve seen is increasingly creative use of lawfare, weaponization of the law, increased new creative use of technology in order to extend the long arm of the state to target people internationally, wherever around the world they may be,” Ms. Gallagher told the lawmakers.
“Concerns over the exploitation of healthcare and genomic data by the PRC are not hypothetical,” a 2021 report by the Director of National Intelligence stated, referring to the official name of China.
According to the report, the CCP has a searchable database of biometric data of Xinjiang residents ages 12 to 65. The authors added that “the CCP’s mass collection of DNA at home has helped it carry out human rights abuses against domestic minority groups and support state surveillance.”
Christo Grozev, an investigative journalist with Bellingcat Productions, a Netherlands-based investigative journalism group, said at the hearing that DNA collection “would contribute to the toolset of transnational repression.”
He added that traditional witness protection methods might be affected because DNA is the one biometric that a person cannot change, unlike face and fingerprints. Therefore, Chinese authorities could use the DNA information to verify and track their targets.
By Terri Wu
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