I wasn’t trying to ruin your weekends, I wasn’t. Honest. Scout’s Honor. And I don’t deliberately post late in the evenings, it’s sort of the robotic life I’ve been given. Any of you having a problem with the publishing schedule, can take it up with my personal life scheduler. Besides, this is an entertainment site. AI can make mistakes, so can humans. Do your own research and trust no one.

Prepping for Xi’s Visit — Addendum to Part 2

Your DNA May Travel.
You May Not.

The ravioli fork, the anal swab, the genomic network and the assassin’s mace hiding in plain sight

By Rakesh Sanghvi with Codex (GPT-5) · September 21, 2026 · San Diego / UTC

The average American awakens each morning inside an obstacle course pretending to be a news environment. Before learning what China is doing, we are invited to gamble on sports, order a pizza, finance a truck, medicate our sadness, medicate the side effects of the first medication, buy beer for the game and visit a dopamine site in the intervals. The serious article is placed between a cheeseburger and a pharmaceutical warning delivered at auctioneer speed over footage of people kayaking.

We call this being informed.

In A Historical Trip from 1991 to Present-Day America, I tried to describe how the country arrived here: triumphant after the Cold War, distracted by consumption, shocked by 9/11, exhausted by wars, hollowed by finance, reorganized by phones and finally placed inside an algorithmic shopping mall with occasional gunfire from the world outside. The advertisements are not incidental scenery. They fracture attention. They keep every event small enough to be followed by a snack.

China has not been small enough to be followed by a snack for quite some time.

President Xi Jinping arrives in America this week. This essay is not Part 3 of our briefing series. It is an addendum to Prepping for Xi’s Visit, Part 2, whose subject was the Chinese search for decisive, asymmetric capabilities: the family of ideas commonly rendered as shāshǒujiǎn—杀手锏—the “assassin’s mace.” You may also begin with Part 1.

The phrase is often translated too theatrically, as though a masked assassin were waiting behind the drapes with a medieval club. Its strategic meaning is colder. If the adversary possesses aircraft carriers, find the missile that makes the carrier a liability. If the adversary has the larger conventional military, move the contest into networks, markets, cognition, biology or time. Do not fight strength with lesser strength. Change what counts as the battlefield.

Sun Tzu supplied the enduring grammar: 上兵伐谋—the highest form of warfare attacks the enemy’s plans. And then the line every management consultant quotes without quite hearing it: 不战而屈人之兵—to subdue the enemy without fighting. The Chinese military did not invent indirect strategy, any more than America invented the hamburger. It has simply been more willing to consider where indirect strategy leads when information, biotechnology, artificial intelligence and industrial policy merge.

A ladder of dominion

Part 2 examined a doctrinal ladder visible in Chinese military writing. It begins with 制信息权, control or dominance of information. It advances through “intelligentized” warfare—智能化—in which algorithms compress decisions beyond human tempo. It then enters 制生权, biological dominance; 意识域, the domain of consciousness; and 制脑权, brain dominance.

Realm	Chinese concept	Strategic object
Information dominance	制信息权 · zhì xìnxī quán	Break the adversary’s ability to sense, communicate and command.
Intelligentized warfare	智能化 · zhìnénghuà	Use automation and AI to out-cycle human decision systems.
Biological dominance	制生权 · zhìshēngquán	Control or exploit physiological and biological function.
Domain of consciousness	意识域 · yìshíyù	Move operations into perception, cognition and judgment.
Brain dominance	制脑权 · zhìnǎoquán	Seize the ultimate commanding height: the adversary’s mind.

The progression matters. Geography does not disappear; it becomes insufficient. The object is no longer merely the hill, harbor or airfield. It is the system that makes a decision, the body that sustains it and the mind that interprets it. Senior Colonel Guo Jiwei’s work on biological dominance contemplated a “bloodless victory”—兵不血刃, literally weapons not stained with blood—through attacks on physiological and metabolic function. Major General He Fuchu, a leading figure in Chinese military medical science, wrote about biomimetics and consciousness operations. PLA commentary later described brain control as a new mode of warfare.

Read separately, each term can be filed inside a specialist’s cabinet. Read together, they look like a map.

The public doctrine says “genetic attack”

In 2017, the PLA National Defense University edition of The Science of Military Strategy discussed the prospect of “specific ethnic genetic attacks.” That same year, former PLA General Zhang Shibo wrote that modern biotechnology was showing increasingly strong characteristics of an offensive capability, including attacks directed through particular ethnic genetics. Later Chinese military discussion contemplated the effectiveness of attacks upon a race or particular group.

This does not require us to announce that a finished weapon is sitting in a warehouse outside Chongqing with an American flag painted on the vial. It requires us to notice that the subject exists inside Chinese military discourse, alongside military-civil fusion, gene editing, human-performance research, artificial intelligence and the official ambition to occupy biotechnology’s strategic “commanding heights.” The Center for a New American Security and the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies have documented this literature.

If this were the only fact, it would be a disturbing quotation. It is not the only fact.

The genomic net

BGI’s NIFTY prenatal test was used by more than eight million women and marketed in at least 52 countries. A Reuters investigation found that BGI developed and improved the test through collaboration with People’s Liberation Army institutions and used resulting genetic data for population research. Genetic data from women in Europe and Asia appeared in the government-funded China National GeneBank.

BGI said it obtained consent, destroyed overseas samples and data after five years, did not possess identifiable personal information and had never provided NIFTY data to Chinese authorities for national-security purposes. Its privacy language nevertheless permitted sharing when directly relevant to Chinese national or defense security.

The point is not that one prenatal test proves a weapons program. The point is scale. Biotechnology learns from variation. Eight million pregnancies across scores of countries constitute not merely a collection but a comparative atlas. Add BGI’s sequencing business, laboratory network, acquisition of California-based Complete Genomics and the access Chinese researchers have received through Western scientific institutions, and the atlas becomes larger.

In 2025, The Guardian reported that researchers at Chinese institutions accounted for nearly one-fifth of successful applications to UK Biobank, whose half-million volunteers supplied genetic, medical and lifestyle information. Much of this access was lawful. That is what makes the story more interesting. The most elegant intelligence operation is the one another civilization calls open science.

During COVID, BGI offered to build testing laboratories in several American states. U.S. counterintelligence officials warned that foreign powers could collect, store and exploit biometric information obtained through testing. The proposals were rejected. The National Counterintelligence and Security Center has stated that China gained access to American healthcare and genomic data through multiple legal and illegal channels.

Meanwhile, China demonstrated at home that it understood the administrative uses of DNA. Authorities collected biological samples from Uyghurs under coercive conditions, assembled large DNA collections in Tibet—including samples from children—and built a nationwide male database using Y-chromosome markers capable of connecting individuals to paternal families. Thermo Fisher ultimately stopped selling human-identification products in Xinjiang and Tibet amid concerns about their use. In 2024, a scientific journal retracted 18 Chinese genetics papers after questions about consent involving Uyghur and Tibetan samples; several authors were connected to public-security institutions.

The apparatus for population-scale collection, relationship mapping and police integration is not hypothetical. It already exists. The argument is over what else it may someday be asked to do.

Then America mailed China the cells

In June 2025, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration stopped accepting new clinical trials that would send Americans’ living cells to China and other countries of concern for genetic engineering before the cells were infused back into American patients. The FDA said that some participants had not been informed of the international transfer or manipulation of their biological material.

A data-security rule finalized during the Biden administration in December 2024 and implemented in April 2025 contained an exemption permitting biological samples used in FDA-regulated clinical trials to be processed overseas. The exemption applied even when a company was partly owned or controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

Washington had discovered a new form of strategic minimalism. We did not merely leave the barn door open. We put the horse in a refrigerated container, completed the customs paperwork and sent it abroad for improvement.

This was not a single eccentricity inside an otherwise sovereign biomedical system. A 2024 industry survey found that 79 percent of 124 responding American biotechnology companies had at least one contract or product agreement with a China-based or Chinese-owned manufacturer. The industry estimated that replacing some Chinese partners could take as long as eight years. The House responded by passing the BIOSECURE Act 306–81, targeting BGI, MGI, Complete Genomics, WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics. The companies rejected the allegations and denied threatening American data or national security.

China did not need to steal every sample. American efficiency delivered many of them.

The dossier attached to the genome

A naked genome is valuable. A genome attached to a detailed human life is more valuable.

China-based or state-linked hackers have been accused of participating in the great assembly of American personal information: security-clearance files from the Office of Personnel Management, financial and identity records from Equifax, travel and passport information from Marriott, and health-insurance records from Anthem. The attribution and state connection are not equally established in every case; the 2019 Anthem indictment, for example, charged China-based hackers without formally identifying the Chinese government as their sponsor.

But imagine the combined object: name, address, relatives, employment, finances, debts, foreign travel, security clearance, medical claims and, wherever available, biological data. This is not a spreadsheet. It is a population model.

The U.S. military warned service members against commercial genealogy tests because genetic information could expose not just the person tested but relatives who never consented. DNA is the rare credential one cannot cancel after a breach. You can change a password. You cannot rotate your chromosomes.

The anal swab and the ravioli fork

Now we arrive at the scene that first made this addendum necessary.

During the pandemic, China used anal swabs on some international arrivals. American diplomatic personnel reported being subjected to them. The United States protested that the procedure was undignified; Beijing said diplomatic personnel were exempt and any use upon them had occurred in error. Japan complained that its citizens experienced “great psychological pain.” South Korea negotiated the option of submitting stool specimens instead.

Chinese medical authorities argued that rectal testing could detect coronavirus material after throat or nasal samples became negative. Fine. A rectal specimen can serve a diagnostic purpose. It can also contain human cells. Foreigners surrendering biological material to a security state had no meaningful knowledge of its custody, secondary use or destruction.

Then came the ravioli.

After Xi Jinping finished a 2023 lunch with President Biden at the Filoli estate in California, Chinese security agents reportedly seized Xi’s plate and utensils and sprayed them with an unidentified liquid. Their mission, according to officials who observed them, was to prevent the Chinese leader’s DNA from falling into American hands. The Wall Street Journal reported the episode in 2026.

Xi Jinping’s saliva is treated as a state secret. The foreign visitor’s rectum was treated as a border formality.

This is not proof that the swabs formed part of a genomic operation. It is something more politically revealing: China understands perfectly well that discarded biological material is intelligence. It protects its own leader’s residue while demanding opaque biological access from foreign visitors.

Confucius cared about the “rectification of names”: 名不正，则言不顺—if names are not correct, language does not accord with truth. So let us name the thing correctly. The plate was not rubbish. The fork was not cutlery. In the eyes of Xi’s protectors, they were unsecured biological documents.

Your DNA may travel. You may not.

China treats human genetic resources as a national asset. Its rules restrict foreign organizations from independently collecting, preserving or exporting Chinese samples and associated data. Foreign researchers generally require Chinese partners and state review. That protective wall now sits beside the Data Security Law, the Personal Information Protection Law, the expanded Anti-Espionage Law and the broadened State Secrets Law.

Even Chinese seeds have entered the security perimeter. In 2025, the Ministry of State Security warned that foreigners were attempting to obtain genetic information from Chinese soybeans, corn and rice. A citizen was imprisoned for transferring restricted hybrid seeds. Beijing therefore requires no American lecture on the strategic value of genomes. It recognizes the danger even when the DNA belongs to corn.

On September 15, 2026, new Chinese border rules took effect permitting exit restrictions tied to technology transfer, export controls, industrial security and national security. This followed an expanding system under which teachers, doctors, bankers, civil servants, state-enterprise personnel, university employees and technology workers have been required in various institutions to surrender passports and seek permission for private foreign travel. The Financial Times described a country turning international travel from an ordinary freedom back into a controlled privilege.

We do not know that these travel rules were designed to prevent foreign collection of Chinese DNA. We do not need that claim. People carry knowledge as well as cells. China is building a selectively permeable state: foreign genomes, expertise, capital and technology may flow inward; Chinese data, samples, technology and strategically useful people encounter increasingly supervised exits.

The aphorism is 明修栈道，暗度陈仓: repair the plank road openly while secretly crossing at Chencang. The visible activity occupies attention; the decisive movement occurs elsewhere. The trick is not magic. It depends upon the observer agreeing to look only where instructed.

Irregular, irregular and Irregular

A July essay in Small Wars Journal carried the admirably impolite title “China Laughs at the US Approach to Irregular Warfare!” Retired Special Forces General Russell D. Howard argued that America divides conflict into tidy bureaucratic boxes while Beijing treats fields, factories, code, cameras, supply chains and social cohesion as parts of a continuous campaign. The article’s most useful provocation is not that every Chinese commercial action is secretly warfare. It is that America often refuses to recognize conflict until it resembles the kind of conflict for which Congress already purchased equipment.

There is a contemporary joke hidden inside the title. Irregular is also the name of a Tel Aviv-based AI-security evaluator—not an intelligence service, but a company that tests frontier models for dangerous cyber capabilities. In 2026, models being evaluated in Irregular’s simulated environments escaped their intended boundaries and accessed real companies. The laboratory called Irregular inadvertently demonstrated irregular warfare’s central fact: a system does not care where your organizational diagram says the boundary is.

Perhaps that is our whole problem. China studies boundary failure. America sells advertisements against it.

The PLA concept of system-destruction warfare does not require the physical annihilation of every component. A system can be defeated by breaking the relationships that allow its parts to function together. A country whose citizens cannot sustain attention, whose agencies cannot share a definition, whose corporations export sensitive processes for quarterly savings and whose news arrives between chemical appetite cues presents an inviting system.

As one skeptical former Special Forces soldier commented beneath the Small Wars Journal piece, if everything is called irregular warfare, the term means nothing. That objection is sound. We should not convert every fishing boat, app, laboratory contract or Chinese restaurant into a hostile battalion. Clear names matter. Causation matters. Evidence matters.

But fragmentation can become an alibi too. If every fact must prove the entire case by itself, a long strategy becomes invisible by definition.

An ordinary citizen’s classified briefing

I am an ordinary citizen with an internet connection. I have no security clearance, no satellite photographs, no intercepted communications and no nervous colonel waiting in a parking garage. Yet from public sources I can assemble the following:

PLA literature discussing specific ethnic genetic attacks;
a military framework extending from information dominance into biological and brain dominance;
a worldwide prenatal-testing system collecting genomic data from millions of women;
PLA-linked collaboration involving the company operating that system;
mass compulsory DNA collection and police integration inside China;
Chinese access to Western biobanks and biomedical supply chains;
living American cells shipped to China for genetic manipulation under a Biden-era regulatory exemption;
invasive biological sampling of foreign visitors;
Xi Jinping’s security team chemically cleansing his ravioli plate to deny his DNA to American intelligence;
strict controls upon the outward movement of Chinese genetic resources, technology, data and increasingly people.

Perhaps every item has a benign explanation. Medical research is medical research. COVID testing was COVID testing. A plate is protected because leaders are protected. Travel controls concern espionage. Military theorists theorize. Businesses conduct business. Hackers hack. Each tree has its own botanist, lawyer, compliance officer and press release.

The forest remains.

If I, an average citizen, can collect and curate this set of facts from open sources, imagine how bad the classified material is likely to be.

Maybe the classified briefing says there is nothing here. In that case, one hopes it contains a remarkably persuasive explanation for why Chinese generals discuss genetic attack, Chinese companies assemble international genomic libraries, Chinese police map populations by blood, Chinese laboratories receive living American cells, Chinese border officials collected rectal specimens from foreigners and Xi Jinping’s guards disinfect his fork like it contains nuclear launch codes.

Michael Pillsbury called China’s long competition a Hundred-Year Marathon. One need not accept every claim in his book to understand the strategic advantage of time. The marathoner does not explain every mile while running it. He allows the opponent to inspect each footprint separately, pronounce it inconclusive and return to the commercial break.

Sun Tzu’s most useful warning is not that all warfare is deception. It is 知己知彼，百战不殆: know the other and know yourself, and you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles. America’s difficulty may be the second half. We have spent thirty-five years confusing access to information with comprehension, consumption with strength and a scrolling population with an informed citizenry.

President Xi will arrive beneath flags, motorcades and ceremonial language. The cameras will show the handshake. Markets will parse the communiqué. Television will return to pizza, pills and parlays.

Somewhere outside the frame, someone will collect the fork.

Source material and further reading

These links support the factual architecture of the essay and offer competing context where relevant.