US top official says China conducting 'human testing' for 'biologically enhanced' soldiers

China has conducted “human testing” on the members of its People’s Liberation Army in the pursuit of developing soldiers that have “biologically enhanced capabilities”, said top US intelligence official on December 4. The director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe in an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal elaborated on China having “no ethical boundaries” in its race to attain global power. 

Even though he attempted to make the case stronger that China is currently posing a pre-eminent national security threat to the United States, the former Congress member from Texas failed to elaborate on how Beijing is creating the so-called ‘super soldiers’ such as the ones that are depicted in fictional movies including Marvel Universe’s ‘Captain America’. Ratcliffe said, “There are no ethical boundaries to Beijing's pursuit of power.”

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‘Greatest threat’ since World War II

Ratcliffe also opined in the article that China poses the ‘greatest threat’ to the United States along with the rest of the free world since World War II. In the piece that was published on December 3, the top US intelligence official wrote, “The intelligence is clear: Beijing intends to dominate the US and the rest of the planet economically, militarily and technologically.”

According to him, most of the activities or initiatives by the Chinese government and the firms offer only a layer of camouflage to the activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Ratcliffe further added, “I call its approach of economic espionage 'rob, replicate and replace” He also accused China of ‘robbing the American companies from property and jobs. He wrote, “China robs U.S. companies of their intellectual property, replicates the technology and then replaces the U.S. firms in the global marketplace.”

Even though Ratcliffe’s article came at the time the bilateral relationship between China-US is at an all-time low, the similar claim of Beijing using biotechnology in battlefields was proposed by two American scholars in 2019.  In a paper examining Chinese ambitions of applying biotechnology to the battlefield, they said there were signs that the Asian country was interested in using ‘gene-edition technology to enhance human’ or even soldier performance. The paper was written by Elsa Kania who is an expert on Chinese defence technology at the Center for a New American Security along with Wilson VornDick, a consultant on China matters and ex-Navy officer.

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