Coronavirus: gene firms linked to surveillance

Companies providing coronavirus testing equipment to Australia have been linked to forced collectio­n of Uighur genetic information.

Businessman Andrew Forrest has he didn’t have enough ­information to criticise Beijing’s over its treatment of Uighurs, ‘but I can firmly say that every country has modern slavery’. Picture: AAP

Companies providing coronavirus testing equipment for Australia — one of them with support from miner Andrew Forrest — have been linked to China’s forced collectio­n of genetic information from Muslim minorities in Xinjiang province.

China’s BGI Group and US biotech giant Thermo Fisher are global­ leaders in genetic sequencing, supplying expertise and equipment used by China’s surveillance state.

Mr Forrest has campaigned to end slavery, but refused to criticise China’s detention of a million ­Uighurs in Xinjiang. This week he ­described his “very deep” friendship with BGI Group chairman Wang Jian, who provided 10 million test kits to Australia in a deal with the Fortescue Metals boss.

The Australian government also sourced testing consumables from Thermo Fisher.

La Trobe University China specialist James Leibold said gene technology was “a very powerful forensic tool” that was being used by the Chinese Communist Party as part of its surveillance of Uigh­urs and other minorities.

“I have concerns about those two companies and their links to the uses and abuses of genomic surveillance in China,” Dr Leibold told The Weekend Australian.

According to a major report by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute­ on Chinese technology giants, BGI developed China’s Nationa­l Genebank and has operations in Xinjiang where it claims to contribute to “social stability and economic development”.

Dr Leibold said: “It is already on the record that the authorities under the guise of a ‘free physical’ program have collected biometric samples from the entire popul­ation of Tibet and Xinjiang. It appea­rs those samples have been fed into China's DNA database.”

The BGI chairman was critic­ised for a speech to a big data conference in 2018 declaring BGI staff were not allowed to have children with birth defects. “If they were born with defects, it would be a disgrace to all 7000 staff,” he said.

According to US strategic expert­ Elsa Kania: “There also appear­ to be links between BGI’s research and military research activitie­s, particularly with the (People’s Liberation Army’s) ­National University of Defence­ Technology.”

The New York Times revealed Thermo Fisher sold equipment to Chinese authorities in Xinjiang, where it was used to collect DNA from Uighurs under the “Physicals for All” program.

The company agreed to stop selling its equipment in Xinjiang after Republican senator Marco Rubio asked the US Commerce Department to prohibit American companies from selling technol­ogy to China that could be used for surveillance and tracking. Mr Forrest said he didn’t have enough ­information to criticise Beijing’s over its treatment of Uighurs, “but I can firmly say that every country has modern slavery”.