China's Final Solution: A Tale of Two Nazisms

China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From EuropeBeijing’s pursuit of control over a Muslim ethnic group pushes the rules of science and raises questions about consent.
By Sui-Lee Wee and Paul Mozur

Images from a study in 2013 on 3-D human facial images.

TUMXUK, China — In a dusty city in the East Turkestan colony on China’s western frontier, the authorities are testing the rules of science.
With a million or more ethnic Uighurs and others from predominantly Muslim minority groups swept up in detentions across East Turkestan, officials in Tumxuk have gathered blood samples from hundreds of Uighurs — part of a mass DNA collection effort dogged by questions about consent and how the data will be used.
In Tumxuk, at least, there is a partial answer: Chinese scientists are trying to find a way to use a DNA sample to create an image of a person’s face.
The technology, which is also being developed in the United States and elsewhere, is in the early stages of development and can produce rough pictures good enough only to narrow a manhunt or perhaps eliminate suspects. 

But given the crackdown in East Turkestan, experts on ethics in science worry that China is building a tool that could be used to justify and intensify racial profiling and other state discrimination against Uighurs.
In the long term, experts say, it may even be possible for the Communist government to feed images produced from a DNA sample into the mass surveillance and facial recognition systems that it is building, tightening its grip on society by improving its ability to track dissidents and protesters as well as criminals.
Some of this research is taking place in labs run by China’s Ministry of Public Security, and at least two Chinese scientists working with the ministry on the technology have received funding from respected institutions in Germany. 

International scientific journals have published their findings without examining the origin of the DNA used in the studies or vetting the ethical questions raised by collecting such samples in East Turkestan.
In papers, the Chinese scientists said they followed norms set by international associations of scientists, which would require that the men in Tumxuk (pronounced TUM-shook) gave their blood willingly. 

But in East Turkestan, many people have no choice. 

The government collects samples under the veneer of a mandatory health checkup program, according to Uighurs who have fled the country. 

Those placed in concentration camps — two of which are in Tumxuk — also have little choice.The police prevented reporters from The New York Times from interviewing Tumxuk residents, making verifying consent impossible. 

Many residents had vanished in any case. 

On the road to one of the concentration camps, an entire neighborhood had been bulldozed into rubble.
Growing numbers of scientists and human rights activists say the Chinese government is exploiting the openness of the international scientific community to harness research into the human genome for questionable purposes.
Already, China is exploring using facial recognition technology to sort people by ethnicity. 

It is also researching how to use DNA to tell if a person is a Uighur. 

Research on the genetics behind the faces of Tumxuk’s men could help bridge the two.
The Chinese government is building “essentially technologies used for hunting people,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who tracks Chinese interest in the technology.
In the world of science, Dr. Munsterhjelm said, “there’s a kind of culture of complacency that has now given way to complicity.”

Mapping China’s Faces
Sketching someone’s face based solely on a DNA sample sounds like science fiction. 

It isn’t.
The process is called DNA phenotyping. 

Scientists use it to analyze genes for traits like skin color, eye color and ancestry. 

A handful of companies and scientists are trying to perfect the science to create facial images sharp and accurate enough to identify criminals and victims.
The Maryland police used it last year to identify a murder victim. 

In 2015, the police in North Carolina arrested a man on two counts of murder after crime-scene DNA indicated the killer had fair skin, brown or hazel eyes, dark hair, and little evidence of freckling. 

The man pleaded guilty.
Despite such examples, experts widely question phenotyping’s effectiveness. 

Currently, it often produces facial images that are too smooth or indistinct to look like the face being replicated. 

DNA cannot indicate other factors that determine how people look, such as age or weight. 

DNA can reveal gender and ancestry, but the technology can be hit or miss when it comes to generating an image as specific as a face.
Phenotyping also raises ethical issues, said Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

The police could use it to round up large numbers of people who resemble a suspect, or use it to target ethnic groups. 

And the technology raises fundamental issues of consent from those who never wanted to be in a database to begin with.
“What the Chinese government is doing should be a warning to everybody who kind of goes along happily thinking, ‘How could anyone be worried about these technologies?’” Dr. Ossorio said.
With the ability to reconstruct faces, the Chinese police would have yet another genetic tool for social control. 

The authorities have already gathered millions of DNA samples in East Turkestan. 

They have also collected data from the hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and members of other minority groups locked up in concentration camps in East Turkestan.

Chinese officials have depicted the camps as benign facilities that offer "vocational training", though documents describe prisonlike conditions, while testimonies from many who have been inside cite overcrowding and torture.

Images from a 2018 study on age estimation and age-related facial reconstruction of Uighur men by analyzing 3-D facial images.

Even beyond the Uighurs, China has the world’s largest DNA database, with more than 80 million profiles as of July, according to Chinese news reports.
“If I were to find DNA at a crime scene, the first thing I would do is to find a match in the 80 million data set,” said Peter Claes, an imaging specialist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, who has studied DNA-based facial reconstruction for a decade. 

“But what do you do if you don’t find a match?”
Though the technology is far from accurate, he said, “DNA phenotyping can bring a solution.”

The German Connection
To unlock the genetic mysteries behind the human face, the police in China turned to Chinese scientists with connections to leading institutions in Europe.
One of them was Tang Kun, a specialist in human genetic diversity at the Shanghai-based Partner Institute for Computational Biology, which was founded in part by the Max Planck Society, a top research group in Germany.
The German organization also provided $22,000 a year in funding to Tang because he conducted research at an institute affiliated with it, said Christina Beck, a spokeswoman for the Max Planck Society. 

Tang said the grant had run out before he began working with the police, according to Beck.
Another expert involved in the research was Liu Fan, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Genomics who is also an adjunct assistant professor at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
Both were named as authors of a 2018 study on Uighur faces in the journal Hereditas (Beijing), published by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences. 

They were also listed as authors of a study examining DNA samples taken last year from 612 Uighurs in Tumxuk that appeared in April in Human Genetics, a journal published by Springer Nature, which also publishes the influential journal Nature.
Both papers named numerous other authors, including Li Caixia, chief forensic scientist at the Ministry of Public Security.
In an interview, Tang said he did not know why he was named as an author of the April paper, though he said it might have been because his graduate students worked on it. 

He said he had ended his affiliation with the Chinese police in 2017 because he felt their biological samples and research were subpar.
“To be frank, you overestimate how genius the Chinese police is,” said Dr. Tang, who had recently shut down a business focused on DNA testing and ancestry.
Like other geneticists, Tang has long been fascinated by Uighurs because their mix of European and East Asian features can help scientists identify genetic variants associated with physical traits. 

In his earlier studies, he said, he collected blood samples himself from willing subjects.
Tang said the police approached him in 2016, offering access to DNA samples and funding. 

At the time, he was a professor at the Partner Institute for Computational Biology, which is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences but was founded in 2005 in part with funding from the Max Planck Society and still receives some grants and recommendations for researchers from the German group.
Beck, the Max Planck spokeswoman, said Tang had told the organization that he began working with the police in 2017, after it had stopped funding his research a year earlier.
But an employment ad on a government website suggests the relationship began earlier. 

The Ministry of Public Security placed the ad in 2016 seeking a researcher to help explore the “DNA of physical appearance traits.” 

It said the person would report to Tang and to Li, the ministry’s chief forensic scientist.
Tang did not respond to additional requests for comment. 

The Max Planck Society said Tang had not reported his work with the police as required while holding a position at the Partner Institute, which he did not leave until last year.
The Max Planck Society “takes this issue very seriously” said will ask its ethics council to review the matter, Beck said.
It is not clear when Liu, the assistant professor at Erasmus University Medical Center, began working with the Chinese police. 

Liu says in his online résumé that he is a visiting professor at the Ministry of Public Security at a lab for “on-site traceability technology.”
In 2015, while holding a position with Erasmus, he also took a post at the Beijing Institute of Genomics. 

Two months later, the Beijing institute signed an agreement with the Chinese police to establish an innovation center to study cutting-edge technologies “urgently needed by the public security forces,” according to the institute’s website.
Liu did not respond to requests for comment.
Erasmus said that Liu remained employed by the university as a part-time researcher and that his position in China was “totally independent” of the one in the Netherlands. 

It added that Liu had not received any funding from the university for the research papers, though he listed his affiliation with Erasmus on the studies. 

Erasmus made inquiries about his research and determined there was no need for further action, according to a spokeswoman.
Erasmus added that it could not be held responsible “for any research that has not taken place under the auspices of Erasmus” by Liu, even though it continued to employ him.
Still, Liu’s work suggests that sources of funding could be mingled.
In September, he was one of seven authors of a paper on height in Europeans published in the journal Forensic Science International. 

The paper said it was backed by a grant from the European Union — and by a grant from China’s Ministry of Public Security.

The Question of ConsentTang said he was unaware of the origins of the DNA samples examined in the two papers, the 2018 paper in Hereditas (Beijing) and the Human Genetics paper published in April. 

The publishers of the papers said they were unaware, too.
Hereditas (Beijing) did not respond to a request for comment. 

Human Genetics said it had to trust scientists who said they had received informed consent from donors. 

Local ethics committees are generally responsible for verifying that the rules were followed, it said.
Springer Nature said on Monday that it had strengthened its guidelines on papers involving vulnerable groups of people and that it would add notes of concern to previously published papers.

In the papers, the authors said their methods had been approved by the ethics committee of the Institute of Forensic Science of China. 

That organization is part of the Ministry of Public Security, China’s police.
With 161,000 residents, most of them Uighurs, the agricultural settlement of Tumxuk is governed by the powerful East Turkestan Production and Construction Corps, a quasi-military organization formed by decommissioned soldiers sent to East Turkestan in the 1950s to "develop" the region.

Images from a study in April on how gene variants influence facial morphology in a Eurasian population.

The state news media described Tumxuk, which is dotted with police checkpoints, as one of the “gateways and major battlefields for East Turkestan's security work.”
In January 2018, the town got a high-tech addition: a forensic DNA lab run by the Institute of Forensic Science of China, the same police research group responsible for the work on DNA phenotyping.
Procurement documents showed the lab relied on software systems made by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a Massachusetts company, to work with genetic sequencers that analyze DNA fragments. Thermo Fisher announced in February that it would suspend sales to the region, saying in a statement that it had decided to do so after undertaking “fact-specific assessments.”
For the Human Genetics study, samples were processed by a higher-end sequencer made by an American firm, Illumina, according to the authors. 

It is not clear who owned the sequencer. 

Illumina did not respond to requests for comment.
The police sought to prevent two Times reporters from conducting interviews in Tumxuk, stopping them upon arrival at the airport for interrogation. 

Government minders then tailed the reporters and later forced them to delete all photos, audio and video recordings taken on their phones in Tumxuk.
Uighurs and human rights groups have said the authorities collected DNA samples, images of irises and other personal data during mandatory health checks.
In an interview, Zhou Fang, the head of the health commission in Tumxuk, said residents voluntarily accepted free health checks under a public health program known as Physicals for All and denied that DNA samples were collected.
“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” he said.
The questions angered Zhao Hai, the deputy head of Tumxuk’s foreign affairs office. 

He called a Times reporter “shameless” for asking a question linking the health checks with the collection of DNA samples.
“Do you think America has the ability to do these free health checks?” he asked. 

“Only the Communist Party can do that!”

China Uses DNA to Track Its People, With the Help of American Quislings

The Chinese turned to a Massachusetts company and a prominent Yale researcher as they built an enormous system of surveillance and control.
By Sui-Lee Wee

Tahir Imin, a 38-year-old Uighur, had his blood drawn, his face scanned and his voice recorded by the authorities in China’s East Turkestan colony.

BEIJING — The authorities called it a free health check. Tahir Imin had his doubts.
They drew blood from the 38-year-old Muslim, scanned his face, recorded his voice and took his fingerprints. 

They didn’t bother to check his heart or kidneys, and they rebuffed his request to see the results.
“They said, ‘You don’t have the right to ask about this,’” Mr. Imin said. 

“‘If you want to ask more,’ they said, ‘you can go to the police.’”
Mr. Imin was one of millions of people caught up in a vast Chinese campaign of surveillance and oppression. 

To give it teeth, the Chinese authorities are collecting DNA — and they got unlikely corporate and academic help from the United States to do it.
China wants to make the country’s Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, more subservient to the Communist Party. 

It has detained up to a million people in concentration camps, drawing condemnation and threat of sanctions from the Trump administration.
Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign.

A comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.
Police forces in the United States and elsewhere use genetic material from family members to find suspects and solve crimes. 

Chinese officials, who are building a broad nationwide database of DNA samples, have cited the crime-fighting benefits of China’s own genetic studies.
To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. 

For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by Kenneth Kidd, a Yale University geneticist.

Kenneth Kidd is helping China's Final Solution

On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would no longer sell its equipment in East Turkestan, the colony of China where the campaign to track Uighurs is mostly taking place. 

The company said separately in an earlier statement to The New York Times that it was working with American officials to figure out how its technology was being used.
Kidd said he had been unaware of how his material and know-how were being used. 

He naively "believed" Chinese scientists were acting within scientific norms that require informed consent by DNA donors.
China’s campaign poses a direct challenge to the scientific community and the way it makes cutting-edge knowledge publicly available. 

The Chinese campaign relies on public DNA databases and commercial technology, much of it made or managed in the United States. 

In turn, Chinese scientists have contributed Uighur DNA samples to a global database, violating scientific norms of consent.
Cooperation from the global scientific community “legitimizes this type of Orwellian genetic surveillance,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who has closely tracked the use of American technology in East Turkestan.

China has maintained an iron grip in East Turkestan, where it is trying to make Uighur Muslims more subservient to the Communist Party.

Swabbing Millions
In East Turkestan, in northwestern China, the program was known as “Physicals for All.”
From 2016 to 2017, nearly 36 million people took part in it, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency. 

The Chinese collected DNA samples, images of irises and other personal data.

It is unclear whether some residents participated more than once — East Turkestan has a population of about 24.5 million.
In a statement, the East Turkestan government denied that it collects DNA samples as part of the free medical checkups. 

It said the DNA machines that were bought by the East Turkestan authorities were for “internal use.”
China has for decades maintained an iron grip in East Turkestan. 

In recent years, it has blamed Uighurs for a series of "terrorist" attacks in East Turkestan and elsewhere in China, including a 2013 incident in which a driver struck two people in Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
In late 2016, the Communist Party embarked on a campaign to turn the Uighurs and other largely Muslim minority groups into loyal supporters. 

The government locked up hundreds of thousands of them in what it called "job training" camps, touted as a way to escape poverty, backwardness and radical Islam. 

It also began to take DNA samples.
In at least some of the cases, people didn’t give up their genetic material voluntarily. 

To mobilize Uighurs for the free medical checkups, police and local cadres called or sent them text messages, telling them the checkups were required, according to Uighurs interviewed by The Times.
“There was a pretty strong coercive element to it,” said Darren Byler, an anthropologist at the University of Washington who studies the plight of the Uighurs. 

“They had no choice.”

A market in Kashgar, a city in East Turkestan. China has detained up to a million people in camps in the western region.

Calling Kidd
Kenneth Kidd first visited China in 1981 and remained curious about the country. 

So when he received an invitation in 2010 for an expenses-paid trip to visit Beijing, he said yes.
Kidd is a major figure in the genetics field. 

The 77-year-old Yale professor has helped to make DNA evidence more acceptable in American courts.
His Chinese hosts had their own background in law enforcement. 

They were scientists from the Ministry of Public Security — essentially, China’s police.
During that trip, Kidd met Li Caixia, the chief forensic physician of the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science. 

The relationship deepened. 

In December 2014, Li arrived at Kidd’s lab for an 11-month stint. 

She took some DNA samples back to China.
“I had thought we were sharing samples for collaborative research,” said Kidd.
Kidd is not the only foreign geneticist to have worked with the Chinese authorities. 

Bruce Budowle, a professor at the University of North Texas, says in his online biography that he “has served or is serving” as a member of an academic committee at the ministry’s Institute of Forensic Science.
Jeff Carlton, a university spokesman, said in a statement that Budowle’s role with the ministry was “only symbolic in nature” and that he had “done no work on its behalf.”
“Budowle and his team abhor the use of DNA technology to persecute ethnic or religious groups,” Mr. Carlton said in the statement. 

“Their work focuses on criminal investigations and combating human trafficking to serve humanity.”
Kidd’s data became part of China’s DNA drive.
In 2014, Chinese ministry researchers published a paper describing a way for scientists to tell one ethnic group from another. 

It cited, as an example, the ability to distinguish Uighurs from Indians. 

The authors said they used 40 DNA samples taken from Uighurs in China and samples from other ethnic groups from Kidd’s Yale lab.
In patent applications filed in China in 2013 and 2017, ministry researchers described ways to sort people by ethnicity by screening their genetic makeup. 

They took genetic material from Uighurs and compared it with DNA from other ethnic groups. 

In the 2017 filing, researchers explained that their system would help in “inferring the geographical origin from the DNA of suspects at crime scenes.”
For outside comparisons, they used DNA samples provided by Kidd’s lab, the 2017 filing said. 

They also used samples from the 1000 Genomes Project, a public catalog of genes from around the world.
Paul Flicek, member of the steering committee of the 1000 Genomes Project, said that its data was unrestricted and that “there is no obvious problem” if it was being used as a way to determine where a DNA sample came from.
The data flow also went the other way.
Chinese government researchers contributed the data of 2,143 Uighurs to the Allele Frequency Database, an online search platform run by Kidd that was partly funded by the United States Department of Justice until last year. 

The database, known as Alfred, contains DNA data from more than 700 populations around the world.
This sharing of data could violate scientific norms of informed consent because it is not clear whether the Uighurs volunteered their DNA samples to the Chinese authorities, said Arthur Caplan, the founding head of the division of medical ethics at New York University’s School of Medicine. 

He said that “no one should be in a database without express consent.”
“Honestly, there’s been a kind of naïveté on the part of American scientists presuming that other people will follow the same rules and standards wherever they come from,” Dr. Caplan said.
Kidd said he was “not particularly happy” that the Chinese ministry had cited him in its patents, saying his data shouldn’t be used in ways that could allow people or institutions to potentially profit from it. 

If the Chinese authorities used data they got from their earlier collaborations with him, he added, there is little he can do to stop them.
He said he was unaware of the filings until he was contacted by The Times.
Kidd also said he considered his collaboration with the ministry to be no different from his work with police and forensics labs elsewhere. 

He said governments should have access to data about minorities, not just the dominant ethnic group, in order to have an accurate picture of the whole population.
As for the consent issue, he said the burden of meeting that standard lay with the Chinese researchers, though he said reports about what Uighurs are subjected to in China raised some difficult questions.
“I would assume they had appropriate informed consent on the samples,” he said, “though I must say what I’ve been hearing in the news recently about the treatment of the Uighurs raises concerns.”

Machine Learning
In 2015, Kidd and Budowle spoke at a genomics conference in the Chinese city of Xi’an. 

It was underwritten in part by Thermo Fisher, a company that has come under intense criticism for its equipment sales in China, and Illumina, a San Diego company that makes gene sequencing instruments. 

Illumina did not respond to requests for comment.
China is ramping up spending on health care and research. 

The Chinese market for gene-sequencing equipment and other technologies was worth $1 billion in 2017 and could more than double in five years, according to CCID Consulting, a research firm. 

But the Chinese market is loosely regulated, and it isn’t always clear where the equipment goes or to what uses it is put.
Thermo Fisher sells everything from lab instruments to forensic DNA testing kits to DNA mapping machines, which help scientists decipher a person’s ethnicity and identify diseases to which he or she is particularly vulnerable. 

China accounted for 10 percent of Thermo Fisher’s $20.9 billion in revenue, according to the company’s 2017 annual report, and it employs nearly 5,000 people there.
“Our greatest success story in emerging markets continues to be China,” it said in the report.
China used Thermo Fisher’s equipment to map the genes of its people, according to five Ministry of Public Security patent filings.
The company has also sold equipment directly to the authorities in East Turkestan, where the campaign to control the Uighurs has been most intense. 

At least some of the equipment was intended for use by the police, according to procurement documents. 

The authorities there said in the documents that the machines were important for DNA inspections in criminal cases and had “no substitutes in China.”
In February 2013, six ministry researchers credited Thermo Fisher’s Applied Biosystems brand, as well as other companies, with helping to analyze the DNA samples of Han, Uighur and Tibetan people in China, according to a patent filing. 

The researchers said understanding how to differentiate between such DNA samples was necessary for fighting "terrorism" “because these cases were becoming more difficult to crack.”
The researchers said they had obtained 95 Uighur DNA samples, some of which were given to them by the police. 

Other samples were provided by Uighurs voluntarily, they said.
Thermo Fisher was criticized by Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, and others who asked the Commerce Department to prohibit American companies from selling technology to China that could be used for purposes of surveillance and tracking.


Marco Rubio
✔@marcorubio
Grotesque to read @thermofisher fawning over #XiJinping in #China’s state media.
A reminder #ThermoFisher is making lots of $ helping #Xinjiang authorities conduct mass detention & brutal suppression of #Uyghur Muslims by selling them DNA sequencers.http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201811/05/WS5bdfe891a310eff3032869d9_12.html …
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On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would stop selling its equipment in East Turkestan, a decision it said was “consistent with Thermo Fisher’s values, ethics code and policies.”
“As the world leader in serving science, we recognize the importance of considering how our products and services are used — or may be used — by our customers,” it said.

Tahir Hamut, a Uighur now living in Virginia whose blood was taken by the police in East Turkestan, said it was “inconceivable” that Uighurs there would have consented to give DNA samples.

Human rights groups praised Thermo Fisher’s move. 

Still, they said, equipment and information flows into China should be better monitored, to make sure the authorities elsewhere don’t send them to East Turkestan.
“It’s an important step, and one hopes that they apply the language in their own statement to commercial activity across China, and that other companies are assessing their sales and operations, especially in East Turkestan,” said Sophie Richardson, the China director of Human Rights Watch.
American lawmakers and officials are taking a hard look at the situation in East Turkestan. 

The Trump administration is considering sanctions against Chinese officials and companies over China’s treatment of the Uighurs.
China’s tracking campaign unnerved people like Tahir Hamut. 

In May 2017, the police in the city of Urumqi in East Turkestan drew the 49-year-old Uighur’s blood, took his fingerprints, recorded his voice and took a scan of his face. 

He was called back a month later for what he was told was a free health check at a local clinic.
Mr. Hamut, a filmmaker who is now living in Virginia, said he saw between 20 to 40 Uighurs in line. He said it was absurd to think that such frightened people had consented to submit their DNA.
“No one in this situation, not under this much pressure and facing such personal danger, would agree to give their blood samples for research,” Mr. Hamut said. 

“It’s just inconceivable.”