Experts slam US media outlets after Thermo Fisher stops services in Xizang

On Thursday, Chinese analysts criticized baseless claims repeatedly sensationalized by some US media outlets that China is collecting DNA data in its Xinjiang and Xizang regions for surveillance purposes. The claims come after a US tech company said it halted sales of DNA technology in Southwest China's Xizang Autonomous Region. Analysts said the claims are purely part of a propaganda narrative employed by certain US politicians to tarnish China's reputation and incite separatism.

Biotechnology company Thermo Fisher Scientific stopped selling their DNA collection products to Xizang following criticism from rights groups and pressure from the US Congress, which claimed Chinese police had purchased equipment from Thermo Fisher to engage in mass DNA collection in Xizang for surveillance and control of local residents, Axios reported citing the company.

Also, the Wall Street Journal reported the news and cited human rights groups to balloon the wrongly based theory that China is building a so-called "world's biggest DNA database" to monitor its own citizens, saying the halt in Xizang followed a similar halt of sales to the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.

"We have often witnessed certain US politicians pressuring individual US companies in an attempt to uncover any seemingly reasonable evidence that supports their political agenda. It is absurd to repeatedly witness this narrative being portrayed on screen, as it is completely unfounded," said Zhu Weiqun, former head of the Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference.

Zhu told the Global Times that certain media acted as a helping hand of the US government to expand the lies and solidify the US political agenda to incite separatism in China without fact checking.

Several experts specializing in Xizang reached by the Global Times said the narrative that the "Chinese government is collecting DNA data in Xizang for surveillance" comes out of nowhere. Collecting DNA data in China has been an effective approach for public security organs in the country to trace missing children and combat human trafficking. Xizang has also carried out a crackdown on human trafficking using the same practice, the Global Times found.

A DNA database for abducted children, set up by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS) in 2009, has succeeded in helping a number of children reunite with their families, according to the Xinhua News Agency.

On May 9, 2023, when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused China of collecting human genomic data from ethnic minorities in Xinjiang and Xizang for control and surveillance, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin rebuffed the claims, saying they do not hold water and are nothing but manufactured sensational news items.

Wang said that China is a country governed by law. The privacy of all Chinese citizens, regardless of their ethnic backgrounds, are protected by law.

Diving into the US political narrative, these accusations are a reflection of the US logic in handling domestic race relations - racial lineage theory - which emphasizes racial differences, Shen Guiping, a professor specializing in ethnic affairs at Zhejiang University, told the Global Times.

Some US politicians, however, promote their theories of racial differences to the international community, which is destructive to the harmony of different regions, countries, and even ethnic or racial relations in other nations, Shen said.

The spokesperson from the ministry also noted that while the US is throwing mud on China, it actually widely collects and uses genomic information itself.

Citing the Wall Street Journal, the spokesperson stated that the Pentagon has formulated R&D plans for hitting opponents with genetically engineered weapons. Those involved disclosed that the genomic data of Asian Chinese, European Aryans and Middle Eastern Arabs are all being collected by the US military.

Additionally, according to the website of Russia-based RT, the US Air Education and Training Command (AETC) once issued a tender seeking to acquire samples of ribonucleic acid (RNA) and synovial fluid from Russians.