2022 Winter Olympics: China Loses

Beijing is looking forward to welcoming the world's elite athletes and hundreds of thousands of visitors to the Winter Olympics next year. Hard currency will be flowing in for hotels, food, merchandise and event tickets, but Chinese companies also are counting on profits from collecting and selling the facial characteristics of the world's population, algorithms able to connect a person's face with his or her activities and global DNA samples. Using technology to take advantage of a situation is nothing new. Social media sells information about what we spend time watching to advertisers who benefit from targeting potential consumers. When COVID-19 made shopping in stores deadly, ecommerce profited. There is, however, a difference between being used by social media and an ecommerce giant or being exploited at China's 2022 Winter Olympic Games. The games profit a country that holds up to one million Uighur Muslims in so-called re-education camps, and, according to a BBC report, uses the captives as slaves to pick cotton for China's textile industry. Besides what has been called a form of cultural Muslim genocide, China also has arrested, among others, Hong Kong's political activists, two Canadian journalists and Zhang Zhan, who was attempting to document the origin of the coronavirus in China. China's secrecy regarding COVID-19 focuses attention on the health dangers associated with attending the 2022 Winter Olympics. Just this January, 2021, a new coronavirus outbreak occurred in Shijiazhuang, a city of 11 million. The city's airport, located on a main road into Beijing, is positioned to transport visitors to the Olympics from the south. Since the SAR-coV-2 coronavirus caused the first COVID-19 case at the end of 2019, China's government has done everything possible to prevent a full understanding of what caused the global trauma that has killed over 2.3 million people and undermined economies in at least 170 countries. No one knows if a lab accident or wild animal meat in Wuhan's Huanan market initiated the pandemic. China fostered rumors about the origin of the virus, financed research papers never allowed to be published, closed Wuhan to outsiders and, as late as January, 2021, delayed a team of World Health Organization (WHO) scientists from inspecting Wuhan. Even before the virus posed a health threat to Olympic visitors, Beijing's officials recognized the dust and dirt blowing south from the Gobi Desert north of Olympic sites in Yanqing and Badaling would mix with pollution from fossil fuels heating winter homes and factories to cause irritation to the lungs and eyes of athletes and onlookers alike. Also, pollution was likely to prevent attendees from seeing the Great Wall from a tower constructed for that purpose. In 2018, the military was called into action to plant a tree wall to block desert winds and absorb pollution. Of course, the scrub brush and cactus that grow in desert soils do not provide the kind of barrier China hoped to provide, and the growth of tall, fast-growing trees not native to the area suffered from a lack of sufficient water. In addition to the health risks China's Winter Olympics present, facial identification surveillance is able to track every move athletes and other visitors make. Attendees from around the world offer China a global sample of colors and characteristics that enable surveillance technology to fine tune the potential to recognize every person on Earth. At the same time, the Winter Olympic population would help China develop algorithms capable of connecting facial identifications with the activities of likely domestic dissidents and other troublemakers. China's economy thrives on an ability to monetize every potential income stream, such as sales of new technology to foreign governments determined to monitor and control their populations. Beijing seems all too willing to lead and support an alliance of like-minded, state-dominated authoritarian regimes ready to claim equal status with the governments of countries that value the rights of individuals, an independent judiciary, and, in short, derive their legitimacy from the consent of the governed. Not content with using existing methods to pursue world domination, China is now intent on weaponizing a new technique. After seeing how the COVID-19 pandemic crippled the world, William Evanina, the recently retired director of the Counterintelligence and Security Center, reported China is poised to create a data base of DNA samples used to predict a new disease capable of infecting the world. In reality, a single mutation rarely causes a disease; more often diseases are influenced by a variety of genetic DNA factors, each having a small, but significant, effect. Since identifying the cause of complex physical and psychological disorders requires a vast number of sample cases, countries, such as the UK, the Netherlands and Estonia, pool cases in biobanks designed to help rearchers prevent medical problems and find cures. China's BNG biotech giant had a different purpose for trying to establish COVID-19 testing labs that could collect DNA samples in the United States. China planned to use these samples to be first to predict a new disease and to provide the medicine, vaccines, equipment and supplies vulnerable countries would be willing to pay and do anything China wants. At China's Winter Olympic Games, anything anyone from around the world touches, and anything that touches him or her, could add to China's DNA collection. Skiers, skaters, hockey teams, snowboarders and curlers can test their skills at other competitions. No mandate requires any country's Olympic athletes to serve as lab mice for Chinese experiments and profit. (Also, see the earlier post, "All Work and No Play Unmakes China.")