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China took Manufacturing, then Tech and the West gave them away. Now it’s come for biotech…

China has become the Wild West of bio-research

 

China, dragon flag.

The ZMan spots a repeat cycle of knowledge-hauls as China siphons off Western intellectual property, often with the help of the West.

First China hauled (and we gave) the factories, then it was the hi tech industry, now it’s biomedical ingenuity. The pattern repeats. China offered cheap labor for manufacturers and the tech industry with few annoying environmental burdens. Now China offers money and freedom from ethical quandaries for researchers who want to clone, create bioweapons, or hybrid human-animal cells.

The question for the West is, if environmental or ethical standards matter at home, shouldn’t they matter overseas too? If we aren’t happy to buy shirts made by slaves at home, why are foreign slave shirts OK? If we aren’t keen to fund bioweapons research in our own lands, why was it OK to help do that in China? (Thank Anthony Fauci).

Chinese Ethics, The ZMan

China makes it so easy for Western Scientists to collaborate:

There is no doubt that most Western governments operate biological research facilities. The fact that China is doing the same is no surprise. The difference is Western governments have to worry about whistleblowers who will spill the beans on anything illegal. They also have to worry about anything unethical. The Chinese, in contrast, arrests whistleblowers and harvest their organs. Scandal is not a concern for the ChiComs.

Again, bioethics are not a concern for China. What matters most to the Chinese is acquiring as much technology as possible as quickly and cheaply as possible. This is why China has become the wild west of bio-research. Western researchers know they can do whatever they want in China. They will be free of Western ethics and get all the money they need. They just have to share their work with their new masters.

The West was ripe for plucking:

What the Chinese have figured out is they can use the same methods on the Western scientific community as they used to lure Western manufacturers. The promise of cheap labor and loose environmental laws, along with subsidies from the Chinese government, lured business from the West. Sure, it often meant that local Chinese firms pirated the products they were making for Western companies, but that was just a cost of doing business in China. It was still good business.

The tech industry fell for the same deal. They were initially lured to China in order to build out the infrastructure. They got access to a pool of smart engineers, who worked for pennies on the dollar, relative to American engineers. They also got the sweet contracts from the government. The tech companies also got to learn the finer points of population control from the Chinese. This was good business for the Chinese, who were able to accelerate their tech sector.

Do those cumbersome Western Ethics matter? As ZMan says — we’re going to find out:

Maybe Covid was the wake-up China needed to put some limits on this research. Maybe it was just viewed as the cost of becoming the dominant player in the field. Maybe that cost will be regular pandemics of man-made viruses leaking from Chinese labs.

Most important, what we are seeing is what happens when a society decides that the value of everything is what someone will pay for it. In America, everything has a price, so nothing has value. The elites are happy to trade technology to China, because the only thing that matters is short term profit. From the Chinese perspective, the American empire is not a competitor. It is just a big candy store that she can systematically pick clean until it finally collapses. This is the war China knows it can win.

China, emeishan lion statue.

Image by Chris Feser

UPDATE: How timely — 

Researcher Sentenced to 33 Months in Prison for Stealing Trade Secrets to Sell in China

April 20th, 2021, Epoch Times

Zhou Yu, 51, pleaded guilty in December 2020 to stealing at least five trade secrets relating to exosome research from the Nationwide Children’s Hospital’s Research Institute in Columbus, Ohio, where he had worked for 10 years until 2017. Exosomes are small sacs of fluid released from cells that have increasingly been used in the research, identification, and treatment of a range of diseases, including liver fibrosis and liver cancer.

Zhou’s co-conspirator was his wife, Chen Li, 48, who also worked as a researcher at another lab in the institute. She was sentenced in February to 30 months in prison for her role in the scheme after also pleading guilty.

“Zhou and his wife executed a scheme over the course of several years to set up businesses in China, steal American research, and profit from doing so,” acting U.S. attorney Vipal J. Patel for the Southern District of Ohio said in a statement.

Zhou’s case is among dozens of prosecutions brought by the department in recent years targeting Chinese state-sanctioned theft…

h/t David

Image: China Dragon Flag by Chris Feser

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