China’s Military Declares Biotechnology Warfare as its Fundamental Guiding Principle

China’s People’s Liberation Army believes that biological weapons, not nuclear weapons, are the key to global military dominance.

In our recent Gateway Pundit article, we described the 2005 and 2006 Chinese military publications by Colonel Ji-wei Guo, who advocated the use of biotechnology in developing new methods of waging war and recommended that military medical doctors be involved in creating bioweapons.

In his 2008 book, “Biological Outlook on War and Foresight of Biotechnology Supremacy,” Colonel Guo elaborated on the application of biotechnology in bio-based war, representing the “Third Leap” in military strategy:

“The third leap includes biotechnology and related sciences that develop and grow on the basis of information technology (including advanced computer and communication), nano-science and other convergence technologies, where biotechnology and biomedical science (including genetic engineering), cognitive science (including cognitive neuroscience) are comprehensively applied. It will cause huge quantitative changes in the combat environment, combat methods, space-time relationship, military structure and function, and will eventually cause new qualitative changes, which will bring about profound changes in modern military history. The operational level change brought by this military transformation is the further extension of the theory of power control with modern biotechnology as the main feature.”

In his 2012 article “Development of military biotechnology and the future of bio-based war,” Major General Fu-Chu He wrote:

“As an emerging technology, military biotechnology expands the concept of weaponry and equipment, and becomes an important driving force behind the weaponry and equipment development. In recent years, great breakthroughs have been made in many fields of military biotechnology, such as synthetic biology, brain-computer interface and brain control, biological materials, bio-inspired machinery, bio-fuels, bio-electronics, bio-computing and non-lethal weapons, leading to the birth of new operational concepts. In future wars, military biotechnology will promote the bio-based weaponry and equipment, bio-based forces and bio-based combat style.”

Major General Fu-Chu He was President of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Vice President of China’s Academy of Medical Sciences, an Alternate Member of the 18th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and Vice Director of Scientific and Technical Committee affiliated to Central Military Commission, which is China’s equivalent of the U.S. Department of Defense’s DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Major General Chen Wei is presently the Director of the Institute of Biotechnology, Academy of Military Medical Sciences and presumed head of China’s biological warfare program.

She was placed in command of the “clean up” operation in Wuhan after local authorities lost control of the COVID-19 outbreak. She also led China’s effort to create a COVID-19 vaccine.

Published in 2014, Major General Chen Wei co-authored the book “Biotechnology Development Yearbook, 2013,” which described the major biotechnological advances and their impact on military medical science.

The book contained 10 sections with 25 specific biotechnological topics including gene manipulation, synthetic biology, gene sequencing, biotherapeutics, biomaterials, bioinformatics, bio-imaging, cloning, and neurobiology.

In 2016, the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan’s Science and Technology Military-Civilian Fusion Program was launched by the Scientific and Technical Committee affiliated with the Central Military Commission.

That program incorporated all Chinese universities, pharmaceutical companies and “civilian” research centers, like the Wuhan Institute of Virology, into the People’s Liberation Army’s biotechnology warfare effort.

It is not then surprising that Major General Chen Wei’s predecessor as Director of the Institute of Biotechnology and retired Vice President of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences, Major General Pei-Tang Huang became an independent director of Hualan Biological Bacterin Inc. on April 26, 2019.

Given the intensity of the military-civilian research fusion program, perhaps it is no coincidence that in the two to three months after Pei-Tang Huang’s appointment, the chief executive officers of twenty-three multinational and domestic pharmaceutical companies across China resigned or retired, including Sanofi, Roche, Bayer, Bristol-Myers Squibb and General Electric Healthcare.

In April 2021, Hualan Biological Bacterin Inc. announced an exclusive agreement with the Russian government to produce 100 million doses of the Sputnik V COVID-19 vaccine developed by the Gamaleya Research Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology of Russia’s Ministry of Health.

None of the above seems to have drawn the attention of those responsible for U.S. national security.

Clearly, the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. intelligence agencies lack a basic understanding of the direction and extent of China’s biotechnology warfare program.

U.S. government officials seem unaware that COVID-19 was certainly an element of that program, perhaps even a test of it.

Lawrence Sellin, Ph.D. is retired U.S. Army Reserve colonel and a veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq. He had a civilian career in international business and medical research. His email address is lawrence.sellin@gmail.com. Anna Chen can be followed on Twitter @2020Gladiator