Chinese surveillance, DNA collection companies highlight perils of Xi’s military-civilian fusion strategy

FORUM Staff

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) hired a company to surveil its detractors abroad, steal other nations’ data and promote CCP narratives on social media, according to February 2024 news reports.

CCP authorities contracted the Chinese cybersecurity firm I-Soon to hack networks across Central and Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to help the party-state control dissidents and repress minorities, according to The Associated Press (AP).

I-Soon also claimed to have hacked dozens of government agencies in Malaysia, Mongolia and Thailand for customers including local and provincial bureaus of the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) state security and public security ministries, and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), The Wall Street Journal reported. The newspaper reviewed documents leaked from I-Soon, which appears to be one of several private firms the CCP uses to further its global spying operations.

Analysts say the revelation of the commercial hacking illustrates the unscrupulous underpinnings of the CCP’s military-civilian fusion (MCF) strategy.

“The hackers were focused on domestic threats that migrated abroad,” Drew Thompson, a senior research fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, told The Wall Street Journal. “Their clients were keen on data from government bureaus, telecommunication providers, airlines, so they could monitor and access individual emails, phones and keep track of dissidents abroad,” said Thompson, formerly a senior official at the United States Department of Defense (DOD).

MCF is part of a plan promoted by CCP General Secretary Xi Jinping to enable the PLA to become the world’s most technologically advanced military by 2049. As chair of the CCP’s Central Military Commission and the Central Commission for Military-Civil Fusion Development, created in 2017, Xi oversees the strategy’s implementation, including an array of approaches to bind military components to seemingly innocuous civilian activities, the DOD’s 2023 China Military Power Report noted.

Many nations seek to share civilian and military technology advances across both sectors to yield greater benefits for each. However, to achieve such transfers, the CCP routinely ignores international ethical standards and norms, alarming many. In contrast, when the U.S. government contracts a private firm, it is legally required to demonstrate transparency, a practice emulated by like-minded countries worldwide.

The CCP’s ongoing global collection of genetic data is another high-profile example of Xi’s MCF strategy appearing to work for nefarious purposes. Experts worry that the party might use its growing genetic database to control or harm civilian populations in China or abroad despite the CCP’s denials of such intentions.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, under the guise of providing health assistance, the CCP took advantage of its newly expanded access to foreign countries to increase its massive database of human DNA, The Washington Post newspaper reported in September 2023. The PRC distributed gene-sequencing equipment and set up “partnerships” for genetic research in countries in need to gain access to more populations.

The CCP has been collecting genetic data for more than a decade using tactics such as acquiring U.S. genetics companies and multilayer hacking operations, the newspaper reported.

Firelabs, the Chinese company that produces the gene-sequencing equipment, is owned by Chinese military company BGI, which also collected genetic data from prenatal test kits sold worldwide, according to Reuters.

Human rights organizations have revealed orchestrated campaigns by the CCP to forcibly collect biometric data from regions in China with large minority populations. Human Rights Watch documented efforts by Chinese police beginning in 2017 to require blood samples, fingerprints and iris scans from all adults in Xinjiang province, home to an estimated 12 million Uyghurs. Authorities initiated similar efforts in Chinese-controlled Tibet in 2020, Human Rights Watch reported.

The U.S. has blacklisted BGI subsidiaries for helping the CCP analyze genetic data to advance its crackdowns on ethnic and religious minorities. In March 2023, the U.S. Commerce Department banned U.S. companies from doing business with two BGI subsidiaries, citing the risk of “diversion to China’s military programs.”

“Chinese academics and military scientists have also attracted attention by debating the feasibility of creating biological weapons that might someday target populations based on their genes,” The Washington Post reported.

Although there is no public evidence that Chinese companies have used foreign DNA for activities outside scientific research, many observers are alarmed that such practices could give the PRC a strategic advantage economically and militarily, according to the Post.

“We’re just on the cusp of beginning to understand and unravel what genes do,” Anna Puglisi, former U.S. chief national counterintelligence officer for East Asia, told the Post. “Whoever gets there first is going to control a lot of really amazing things. But there is also a potential for misuse,” said Puglisi, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.