US media reports claim China deep in ‘brain warfare research’

During the last few years, a research institute in China has been busy developing weapons that would be able to “paralyze” enemies rather than killing them, US media reports claim.

The Washington Times translated and analyzed three 2019 reports by the People’s Liberation Army, which had been published in the official military newspaper PLA Daily. The American paper says these documents “shed light on the depths of China’s brain warfare research and show that it has been underway for several years.”

“War has started to shift from the pursuit of destroying bodies to paralyzing and controlling the opponent,” reads one of the PLA Daily’s reports, called ‘The Future of the Concept of Military Supremacy.’

According to The Washington Times, the Chinese researchers have been studying “integrating humans and machines toward the goal of creating enhanced human physiological and cognitive capacities,” as well as working on the brain’s defenses against brain-control attacks.

The US seems to be increasingly worried by the scope of China’s military research. On December 16 the US Department of Commerce announced a decision to place China’s Academy of Military Sciences (AMMS) and 11 affiliated research institutes on an export blacklist “to address the ongoing threats to U.S. national security and foreign policy” presented by China’s efforts “to develop and deploy biotechnology and other technologies for military applications and human rights abuses.”

The head of the Commerce Department, Gina Raimondo, claimed that China used biotechnology and medical innovation “to pursue control over its people and its repression of members of ethnic and religious minority groups.” The document published on the federal register further claims that AMMS and related institutes “use biotechnology processes to support Chinese military end uses and end users, to include purported brain-control weaponry.”

According to a senior US official quoted by The Financial Times, China is working on “gene editing, human performance enhancement [and] brain machine interfaces.” The Chinese authorities reject all such claims as “groundless.”

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