International opposition is growing against Beijing for DNA profiling of people in Tibet and Xinjiang
China is running two special demographic profiling campaigns these days which have attracted international attention and opposition from the human rights groups and political leaders of Europe and USA. One campaign is about mass scanning of irises of people in the Qinghai province and the other is about mass Blood sampling of Tibetan people for their DNA profiling. On the face of it these campaigns may look like any other public health related programs which are common in most of the countries. But it is the fishy history of China’s treatment of its occupied colonies which makes it stink. And the stink is now being felt across the continents.
On 19th December parliamentarians from 15 countries called upon their respective governments to sanction their companies who are involved in supplying equipment and chemical reagents to China to run these programs. In a letter, signed jointly by MPs from countries including USA, the European Union, Canada, UK, Switzerland, Ukraine, Czech Republic and New Zealand, they have called upon their governments to investigate and suspend business activities with companies supplying the PRC government with biometric surveillance technology which are being used in East Turkistan (Ch: ‘Xinjiang’) and Tibet. These MPs are members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC).
Human Right Watch, a prominent action group had earlier reported that PRC authorities have been conducting mass DNA collection program in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) since 2016 and it has already covered a third of Tibetan population which includes children also. The US government has already included in its sanction-list the PRC-State funded gene firm BGI Group for participating in a similar DNA collection campaign in Xinjiang in 2020. American company Thermo Fisher is known for supplying DNA profiling kits to Chinese police in TAR. In a report released by ‘The citizen Lab’ and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto in Canada on December 22 it is said that the Chinese police have scanned the iris of over 1.2 million citizens of Qinghai province of China for their security database.
The biometric scanned data of the iris in a human’s eye is a vital tool to identity an individual among a set of millions of people as it works like the fingerprint of an individual. Qinghai has a dominant population of Tibetan and Hui Muslims. In order to justify this programme the Chinese police department claims that the programme is “necessary for mass iris scan collection, including fighting crime, finding missing people, and upgrading national ID cards”. Human rights activists fear that this type of scanning will further strengthen and give new teeth to the already overbearing electronic surveillance system that uses millions of CCTV cameras and face recognition tools which are supported by artificial intelligence.
The inclusion of modern medicine tools like DNA profiling and iris scanning at mass levels has given rise to fears of using these tools to further promote China’s inhuman international business of forcibly harvested human organs. This multi-billion dollar business, patronized by senior communist leaders and top military brass of PLA has gained extraordinary momentum since 1999 when erstwhile President Jiang Zemin unleashed his campaign to crush the fast spreading movement of Falun Gang, a spiritual movement whose followers practice Yoga like health exercises and abstain from vices like alcohol and smoking. In the following years the human organs, harvested from executed political ‘criminals’ and Falun Gang prisoners finally
lead to an organized and nationwide flourishing medical ‘business.’ This business is based on the database of DNA and blood profiles of thepeople living in official and undeclared jails of the CCP. Interestingly, China has emerged as the biggest centre of organ transplant in the world because of quick availability of human organs like kidney, liver, cornea, spleen, pancreas and even lungs and hearts at a much lower price as compared to any other country.
In a recently held international webinar on “Forcibly Harvesting of Human Organs in China” by the Centre for Himalayan Asia Studies and Engagement of New Delhi,Dr. EnverTohtiBughda, an exiled medical doctor of Uygur origin testified and gave gory details of how a nationwide databank of Blood and DNA profile of prisoners is used to provide perfectly matching organs to patients from rich western and Gulf countries on an as short notice as four hours. “While patients needing liver or kidney transplant may have to wait for months or years and spend hundreds of thousand dollars in a country like America, there are Chinese hospitals who offer a matching organ within four hours of admission and for only a few thousand dollars,” he said.
Ms. Jennifer Zeng, popular for her YouTube channel “Inconvenient Truths by Jennifer Zeng” used to be a researcher at a top ranking research centre of the State Council of PRC before she escaped and settled in USA. As a devoted Falun Gang practitioner she is now a leading activist against forced harvesting of human organs in China. She gave example of an American patient who was on the long waiting list of a leading heart transplant institute. One day this patient surprised his doctor by telling him that he was going to China where his heart transplant surgery has been scheduled on a specific day. “The doctor had the shock of his life when the patient returned home after having his transplant in China on the prescheduled date. Since human heart cannot survive outside human body beyond very few hours, so it must have been a live ‘donor’ with perfectly matching and pre-tested blood profile who had been left to die after his heart was taken out and transplanted in this patient,” she said.
Pointing out at the vast Chinese data bank of blood profiles and other health details as the real secret of flourishing organ transplant business in today’s China, Dr. Tohti says, “This business is thriving in China only because this database provides perfect victim donors who are allowed to be murdered on the surgeon’s table.” The international anger against the Chinese government and the supportive western companies who supply biometric technologies to the communist masters of China’s colonies is understandable and is hence, growing.