Congressman Slams American Company For Selling DNA Collection Kits To China

WASHINGTON, D.C. - At a congressional hearing, Rep. Chris Smith (R-4th), Chairman of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), called on the United States and international community to immediately step up efforts to combat the Chinese Communist Party’s genocide against the people of Tibet and hold its enablers to account, including and especially American company Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Chaired by Smith, the March 28th hearing included compelling testimony from Richard Gere - the renowned actor and Golden Globe winner who serves as Chairman of the Board of Directors for the International Campaign for Tibet - as well as the Sikyong, or head, of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile.

“All of us need to do a better job exposing and reversing - or at least mitigating - the ugly, hatefilled campaign by the Chinese Communist Party to erase an entire people - the people of Tibet,” said Smith, who has chaired over 85 congressional hearings and markups on China’s egregious human rights abuses.

“Biometric data - DNA and iris scans - of over a million Tibetans have been harvested and stored by the CCP,” said Smith. “Blood samples were drawn even from children in kindergarten.”

“And you know what is even more shocking?” continued Smith.

“It is the role of an American company, Thermo Fisher Scientific in this genetic data collection and genetic surveillance program,” said Smith, who sent a bipartisan letter with his fellow CECC Co-Chairs to the company’s President and CEO Marc Casper in December 2022 asking him why DNA kits and DNA sequencer replacement parts were still being sold directly by his company to police in the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR) for use and abuse in collecting biometric data.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Thermo Fisher announced it would stop selling or servicing genetic sequencers in February 2019 “as consistent with Thermo Fisher’s values, ethics code and policies,” but a 2021 New York Times investigation revealed police were still purchasing their equipment.

In his testimony, Gere pointed to reports that found China’s police may have gathered between 920,000 to 1,200,000 DNA samples in the TAR over the past six years, including by taking blood from children as young as five without their parents’ consent.

“China’s surveillance no longer halts at the Tibetan border,” said Gere. “The CCPs techno-authoritarianism and fear tactics extend to Tibetan communities abroad. This oppression is being perpetrated behind a digital iron curtain to hide reality on the ground. The development of these systems of repression, reaching all the way around the world, reflects the lengths the CCP will go to dismantle the Tibetan civilization.”

The Sikyong testified that “to speed up assimilation, large-scale forced relocation of Tibetans from their traditional homeland to Chinese territories and within Tibet, mass transfer of Tibetan youths to China for labor and incentivized migration of Han Chinese into Tibet are being carried out. Moreover, Tibetan children across Tibet are not only being coerced into colonial boarding schools but transferred to areas across China on a massive scale.”

According to a 2021 report by Tibet Action International, 80 percent of children in the TAR are educated in a massive system of colonial boarding schools, separated from their families and culture as part of the CCP’s forced assimilation of ethnic and religious minority groups.

And a 2022 State Department report found the

CCP also effectively placed Tibetan Buddhism under central government control and subjected Tibetan women to “coerced abortion or forced sterilization.”

Smith’s hearing - entitled “Preserving Tibet: Combating Cultural Erasure, Forced Assimilation and Transnational Repression” - also included expert testimony from Lhadon Tethong, Director of the Tibet Action Institute, and Tenzin Dorjee, Senior Research and Strategist at the Tibet Action Group.

“China is committing genocide in Tibet,” said Tethong, “and has been working for decades to change history, to distort and obscure the present situation on the ground so as to erase Tibet from the world stage, both in the past and in the present.”

“The US, and the West in general, has conceded so much ground to China in the last three decades and moved the equilibrium so far toward Beijing’s baseline,” said Dorjee. “It is time to liberate ourselves from the tragically misguided notion that sweeping human rights under the rug would somehow make China more likely to cooperate on issues of geopolitical interest.”