China Ramps Up Its Mass Surveillance System By Collecting DNA Samples From Its Male Citizens
With every passing year, it seems that the human civilization is becoming, or at least heading towards becoming a giant data base. Whether we like it or not, or whether we give our consent or not, it seems that the authorities, and not only, collect and store more and more of our personal data, seeking to create social profiles, so we can be more easily identified, and last but not least to be easier to control and lead us. A clear example of a fast-moving state moving towards a future totalitarian state is China. The country is still ruled by a communist regime and seems to be dictating trends in surveillance and controlling its citizens.
The almost complete control that it seeks to obtain, and which does not seem to be far away, involves both the collection of personal data of its citizens, online and offline, conducting a campaign to collect DNA samples of all male residents of the country. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China aims to create a genetic database, by trying and collecting blood samples, and not only, from nearly 700 million male subjects in the country.
With the help of this database, the Chinese authorities will be able to access the genealogy of their citizens, will be able to make blood ties and create databases with the relatives of any male person, even by taking saliva samples, or any kind of genetic material available. An American company, Thermo Fisher, came to the aid of the Chinese, which sells testing kits for sampling, and although it is accused by the Americans of violating moral principles of privacy by selling such equipment to the Chinese police, they do business in the first place, and not moral principles.
The official motivation of the Chinese for this type of mass collection is of course the safety of the population, and its protection against criminals, who of course will be caught much easier with the help of this gigantic database containing the genetic material of hundreds of millions of Chinese sex males inhabitants. Human rights activists and defenders in China, however, fear that these samples could also be misused to accuse innocent people of various crimes. The suspects, and automatically the culprits, will be able to come from those who are considered persona non grata, and who do not submit to the Communist regime and the totalitarian system of life that China seeks to create.
"The ability of the authorities to discover who is most intimately related to whom, given the context of the punishment of entire families as a result of one person's activism, is going to have a chilling effect on society as a whole."
Maya Wang - China researcher for Human Rights Watch
The main reason why only men are subjected to this national campaign to collect samples of genetic material, especially blood samples, is that in general criminals are male and creating such a database, they will be easier to find and caught in the future. The almost forced collection of such samples also takes place in schools where police take samples from scared boys, while their colleagues watch these painful scenes, and the image published by the New York Times with such individuals and one of the subjects, a boy of less than ten years, traveled the world.
This campaign was not launched yesterday, and Henan Province is clear proof of its success, where samples of genetic material were collected between 2014 and 2016 from about 10% of the province's male representatives, totaling about 5 million subjects. Since those who collect these samples may discover certain kinship connections between the subjects, they do not even need to take samples from all the people of China. The plan is clear, it consists in obtaining absolute control over the personal information of citizens, even the genetic one, restricting their rights and freedoms, and establishing a totalitarian state that George Orwell warned us decades ago. All in the name of our public safety and protection.
"We are proud to be a part of the many positive ways in which DNA identification has been applied, from tracking down criminals to stopping human trafficking and freeing the unjustly accused."
Thermo Fisher, China's equipment supplier
From cameras with facial recognition functions, a mass surveillance project called Sharp Eye in China, to the creation of social profiles that determine the future freedoms, granted or not, of the Chinese, to new procedures for collecting DNA samples from male citizens, the Chinese state clearly proves the direction in which it is heading, and which, unfortunately in countless cases, is being taken over by the West.
This campaign to collect DNA samples from Chinese men has, of course, provoked negative reactions from activists and human rights representatives in China, who have called for such practices to be regulated and for the authorities to take action. What kind of measures did they actually took? They decided to continue their activity especially in rural areas where the population is clearly much more obedient. The police representatives who facilitated such collections are certainly not all aware of the purpose of these actions.
A clear example that no one escapes sampling is Mr. Jiang, a Chinese computer engineer who is originally from Shaanxi and lives in Beijing, testifying that the police asked him to come to his hometown for sampling, and while he couldn't fulfill that request he went to a hospital in Beijing to collect blood samples, which he sent to the Shaanxi authorities. The main reason for that was that he was afraid of potential repercussions.
Such bizarre situations of collecting more and more of our personal data, including genetic information, which take place in all corners of the world may seem like conspiracy theories to certain people, and currently do not pose a threat to human rights and our fundamental freedoms, but by the time such practices are implemented worldwide, and the right to privacy and full freedom will be abolished, it will probably be too late. There is no point in mentioning that in states clearly run by corrupt governments and authorities such samples of genetic material may even be intentionally deposited at crime scenes, without the donor having any involvement, becoming the innocent prisoner for crimes he did not commit.
What we can do as ordinary people, still holders of fundamental rights and freedoms, is to inform ourselves, to refuse to become part of such practices, and not to fall in the deadly rationality sleep, because it has proven countless times that such sleep gives birth to monsters.
Thanks for attention,
Adrian