DNI Ratcliffe: China Conducting Human Tests to Develop ‘Soldiers With Biologically Enhanced Capabilities’
The experiments may involve CRISPR, which is a gene-splicing technology.
By Leslie Eastman | Legal Insurrection | Monday, December 7, 2020 at 3:00pm
One of my guilty pleasures, movie-wise, is a 1992 film called “Universal Soldier.” The movie’s plot, such as it is, involves two rival soldiers who were killed in Vietnam and brought back to life in an experiment to create superhuman warriors.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliff [sic] wrote that China subjected members of China’s People’s Liberation Army to human experimentation to create “biologically enhanced” super soldiers.
China also steals sensitive U.S. defense technology to fuel President Xi Jinping’s aggressive plan to make China the world’s foremost military power. U.S. intelligence shows that China has even conducted human testing on members of the People’s Liberation Army in hope of developing soldiers with biologically enhanced capabilities. There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing’s pursuit of power.
Ratcliffe told Fox News:
Ratcliffe also discussed the national security threat that China poses to the U.S. and intelligence reports that China is altering its soldiers’ DNA during his “Sunday Morning Futures” interview.
“The People’s Republic of China has 2 million strong in its military, and it’s trying to make them stronger through gene editing, and that’s just one of the ways that China is trying to essentially dominate the planet and set the rules and the world order,” he said. “People need to understand this is an authoritarian regime. It doesn’t care about people’s individual rights. We’ve seen what they’ve done to the Uighurs. We’ve seen what they’ve done in Hong Kong. It’s about putting the state first, and that is the exact opposite of what has always made America great.”
It is suspected that the experiments utilize gene-splicing technology known as CRISPR. Two American scholars wrote a paper examining China’s ambitions to apply biotechnology to create “super soldiers.”
Specifically, the scholars explored Chinese research using the gene-editing tool CRISPR, short for “clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.” CRISPR has been used to treat genetic diseases and modify plants, but Western scientists consider it unethical to seek to manipulate genes to boost the performance of healthy people.
“While the potential leveraging of CRISPR to increase human capabilities on the future battlefield remains only a hypothetical possibility at the present, there are indications that Chinese military researchers are starting to explore its potential,” wrote the scholars, Elsa Kania, an expert on Chinese defense technology at the Center for a New American Security, and Wilson VornDick, a consultant on China matters and former Navy officer.
“Chinese military scientists and strategists have consistently emphasized that biotechnology could become a ‘new strategic commanding heights of the future Revolution in Military Affairs,’” the scholars wrote, quoting a 2015 article in a military newspaper.
Ratcliffe vividly described China as the top national security threat in a recent Wall Street Journal piece.
The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the U.S. and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically. Many of China’s major public initiatives and prominent companies offer only a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party.
I call its approach of economic espionage “rob, replicate and replace.” China robs U.S. companies of their intellectual property, replicates the technology, and then replaces the U.S. firms in the global marketplace.
Take Sinovel. In 2018 a federal jury found the Chinese wind-turbine manufacturer guilty of stealing trade secrets from American Superconductor. Penalties were imposed but the damage was done. The theft resulted in the U.S. company losing more than $1 billion in shareholder value and cutting 700 jobs. Today Sinovel sells wind turbines world-wide as if it built a legitimate business through ingenuity and hard work rather than theft.
