Earlier this year, I was called into the police station in Shenzhen China. Long story short is, I lease a home here and there is a rule if you don't stay in a hotel, you need to register with the local police station upon entry. Well, I didn't know it applied upon every single entry and exit even if I lease my own home and frankly the local police didn't know either. Anyhow, they pretty well booked me with fingerprints and a mugshot. The guy that did the fingerprints pulled out a saliva DNA swab and was getting ready to hand that to me and I was simultaneously getting red-in-the-face and ready to unload with a hell-raising objection. Fortunately, before I exploded, a higher level officer walked in and waved him off not to make me do the DNA swab. But for sure, they are building the database.
I expect that soon enough they will start routinely fetching DNA from foreigners as well. Nations in which the population would object to such things can offload some of their DNA cataloguing requirements to China and others, so people in the US and UK and so on can include the Chinese database in the search when they're matching DNA. Sure, you'll only get people who have been to China (etc.) but it's better than nothing.
The social control aspects are worrying; unmentioned in the article, but equally important, is the likelihood that this is likely to give a significant boost to China's competitiveness in biotechnology.
Why would their competitiveness in biotech be a worry? I can see worrying about some of the unsavory parts (getting DNA samples from heretofore innocent people, under false pretense, one might add) but the leg up on better analytics is not a bad thing.
Never the less, the tech for most of sample processing is from Thermo-Fischer.
> Why would their competitiveness in biotech be a worry?
They claim rights to territory held by over a dozen separate neighbors and have invaded more than one since 1980. There's a strong argument to be made that China pulling ahead in a military technology will spark WW3, or at the very least the invasion of Taiwan—an advanced democratic nation with a population on par with Australia's.
I'm not worried about it, it's just an observation that I was surprised not to see mentioned since it may be just as big a motivation to mandate collecting the data as the crime/oversight uses.
