It’s not King Herod decreeing that male children should be killed, but it certainly is eyebrow-raising: China’s ever-growing, totalitarian surveillance state is now requiring blood samples from boys in provinces across the nation.
This is according to Bitter Winter (BW), a magazine on religious liberty and human rights in China. BW reports that one explanation given to concerned parents of schoolboys was that the program was designed to “prevent children from being lost or abducted.” Of course, though, since girls can be abducted, too, this excuse only further raises suspicions.
Providing background, BW wrote yesterday that since “the beginning of 2016, the government of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region has been collecting DNA samples from Uyghurs and other Muslims to build databases for tracking and monitoring them. As this measure in the name of ‘maintaining social stability’ spreads across mainland China, the CCP [Chinese Communist Party] is collecting biometric data on an ever-increasing scale. All males, including young children, are now mandated to give blood samples.”
BW continues:
Residents of Guigang, Guilin, Hechi, and Cenxi cities in southern China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region reported to Bitter Winter that local police uniformly collected blood samples from primary and middle school boys in November. This has been done without informing their guardians.
“Isn’t it the doctor’s duty to take blood? Why did the police do it?” a parent of a primary school student asked. “Blood samples have been taken from students in many schools, as part of the government’s massive operation. No notice or written communication has been issued to parents. We felt very unsafe.”
When parents demanded to know the reasons for the collection of blood samples from their children, the schools explained that it was needed “to prevent children from being lost or abducted and sold.”
“If it is to prevent children from being lost or abducted, why have samples been taken only from boys and not girls? Because girls won’t be lost? It’s really strange!”
Reporting on the program in October, shortly after a government announcement relating to it was made, the Epoch Times wrote that “China is building a massive DNA database” on its citizens.
The announcement stated that “the effort is part of the ‘public security’s basic information work’ to ‘improve the precision and controllability of population management,’ and the samples would be collected either by group or door-to-door,” the Times related.
The program “is just one of the most recent compulsory DNA collection initiatives, which critics of Chinese authorities say are a gross violation of privacy and serve to further the regime’s plan to control the genetic makeup of its population,” the Times continued.
The Times also informs that the goal of the male-oriented program is to develop a comprehensive “Y-STR database.” Y-STR stands for “Y-chromosome short tandem repeat” analysis, which relates to “DNA information passed down along the male descendants of families,” the Times tells us.
Bitter Winter reports on the most plausible explanation for the current program, quoting a teacher from Guilin. “The collection of blood samples is demanded in a government-issued document, which proclaims that they will be used by law enforcement to find criminals,” related BW. “No matter where they escape, the police can locate them.”
Since boys and men are not only more likely to commit violent crimes — but, note, are also more likely to be the revolutionaries opposing state tyranny — the current focus on a Y-STR database may make sense.
On an even darker note, BW writes that because “schools were secretive and couldn’t provide adequate explanation” for the blood-collection program, some parents “worried that DNA samples will be used for organ harvesting.”
(Note: It could occur to a person that since China’s recently scrapped one-child policy led to a sex imbalance in which males notably outnumber females, the Beijing government may view boys as more expendable. Just a wild thought.)
This said, the latest initiative is apparently just part of a wider effort to collect DNA on China’s entire population. The purposes, though, would still largely be nefarious.
Bitter Winter writes that one motivation is to facilitate religious persecution. For example, “In July, the police harassed the parents of a member of The Church of Almighty God who has been on the run to escape persecution and forcibly collected their blood samples, claiming that this will help them to track down the believer,” the site relates.
As to another motivation, “Steven Mosher, an expert in population control [and] president of U.S.-based think tank Population Research Institute … said the term ‘population control’ has always had an ‘eugenics element,’” the Epoch Times reports.
“The regime wants to ensure ‘quality births,’ Mosher told The Epoch Times, adding that one way to achieve that is by tracing ‘who is related to whom,’ so authorities can eliminate those carrying recessive genes that produce birth defects.’”
“‘With the advent of genetic testing, [this practice] is about to get a high-tech boost and become much more comprehensive,’ he said,” the site further related.
Eugenics, the science of improving the human gene pool via selective breeding (and now genetic engineering), gained much credence in the early 1900s, especially in Britain and the United Sates. It was later discredited when the Nazis in Germany pursued it, killing innocents and violating human rights in the process.
The Chinese authorities are similarly disposed, using deception, threats, and even physical force to collect reluctant subjects’ blood. Yet this is just part of Beijing’s wider development of an all-encompassing surveillance state that seems to mistake George Orwell’s 1984 for an instruction manual. As Sarah Cook, a senior China analyst at U.S. human rights advocacy group Freedom House, put it while addressing the massive DNA collection program, the fascistic Beijing regime “treats the Chinese population as nothing more than slaves, with whom you can do exactly as you please.”
Yet is this surprising? China is not only the world’s most irreligious country, but atheism is its government’s “official” position. This matters because atheism has a certain corollary: that we have no souls and then are, essentially, mere organic robots, some pounds of chemicals and water.
And, of course, what could be wrong with altering an organic robot’s software (social engineering) or, more to the point here, its hardware (genetic engineering)? For that matter, what could be immoral about terminating an organic robot’s function? Material things are there to be used, after all — and discarded when no longer needed.
It really is no surprise that men who believed our rights come from God forged the United States — and that a godless state proceeds as if people are objects that have no rights.
Selwyn Duke (@SelwynDuke) has written for The New American for more than a decade. He has also written for The Hill, Observer, The American Conservative, WorldNetDaily, American Thinker, and many other print and online publications. In addition, he has contributed to college textbooks published by Gale-Cengage Learning, has appeared on television, and is a frequent guest on radio.
