The US government has sanctioned China’s Academy of Military Medical Sciences and 11 affiliated research institutes for using “biotechnology” that “controls the brain” to support the armed forces.
The US Commerce Department, which blacklisted the Chinese institutes, did not go into detail about the weapons, but another cache of military documents from 2019 suggests that China is focusing on ‘paralyzing and controlling the opponent’ by ‘attacking the enemy’s will to resist,’ rather than destroying the enemy.
The Chinese Academy of Military Sciences and its affiliates are now on the ‘entity list,’ which means that American firms cannot export or transfer goods to them without a license, according to documents obtained and translated by the Washington Times in 2019.
According to one US official who spoke to the Financial Times, the technology that China is attempting to develop includes ‘gene editing, human performance enhancement [and] brain machine interfaces.’
The US Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo, expressed concern that China will use such weapons to maintain control over its own citizens, including ethnic minority Uighur Muslims.
‘Unfortunately, the People’s Republic of China has chosen to use these technologies to pursue control over its people and repression of ethnic and religious minority groups,’ she said.
‘We cannot allow US commodities, technologies, and software that support medical science and biotechnological innovation to be diverted away from uses that are detrimental to US national security.’
The Commerce Department also blacklisted companies from China, Georgia, Malaysia, and Turkey for allegedly diverting US goods to Iran’s military, a US adversary.
According to the former Trump administration, the Chinese Academy of Military Medical Sciences was involved in the development of the covid-19 vaccine.
This year, however, the academy has been active in the development of a Covid-19 vaccine, despite the fact that the United States has grown increasingly concerned about the links between civilian and military research in China.
