It's something straight out of science fiction flicks, only this time it's the Chinese and not Hollywood.
Based on reports by U.S. intelligence, China has started human testing on members of its People's Liberation Army with the determined push to create soldiers with enhanced biological capabilities.
U.S. chief of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe, exposed the Chinese military program in a Wall Street Journal editorial in which he claimed that the country is a threat to U.S. national security.
Ratcliffe warned that the U.S. must be prepared for an "open-ended" showdown with China, which he likened to the Cold War. "There are no ethical boundaries to China's ambition of power," the Republican former member of Congress from Texas said, as per NBC News.
In the newspaper op-ed, Trump's outgoing national intelligence director said that the intelligence is clear: China is setting its sights to dominate the U.S. and even the rest of the world militarily, technologically, and economically.
According to Ratcliffe, he calls Beijing's approach to economic espionage as "rob, replicate and replace." "China robs the U.S. companies of their intellectual property, replicates their technology and then replaces American companies in the global marketplace," the Associated Press quoted him as saying.
Ratcliffe said he had shifted resources in the U.S. intelligence budget to focus on China. He said several political and military analysts and officials within the government's intelligence networks have also been monitoring Russia and counter-terror efforts.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying dismissed the newspaper op-ed as a further move to disseminate "false information, political viruses and lies" to destroy the country's reputation and U.S.-China ties.
Ratcliffe's office and the Central Intelligence Agency did not immediately respond to requests to share more input on the concept that Beijing planned to build "super soldiers" of the sort depicted in American movies like "Universal Soldier," "Robocop," "Captain America" and "Bloodshot."
Trump administration officials have been ramping up their anti-China rhetoric for months, even before the U.S. presidential campaign as the incumbent president sought to parry blame for the spread of the coronavirus.
In 2019, two American scholars wrote a paper that delved into China's pursuits to employ biotechnology on the battlefield. Specifically, the authors examined Chinese studies using CRISPR, an acronym for "clusters of regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats."
The gene-editing tool has been used to treat genetic disorders and modify plants, but Western scientists view it as wrong to alter genes to increase the performance of healthy people.
