Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West

Beijing’s pursuit of control over a Muslim ethnic group pushes the rules of science and raises questions about consent.

Images from a study in 2013 on 3-D human facial images.Credit...BMC Bioinformatics

TUMXUK, China — In a dusty city in the Xinjiang region on China’s western frontier, the authorities are testing the rules of science.

With a million or more ethnic Uighurs and others from predominantly Muslim minority groups swept up in detentions across Xinjiang, officials in Tumxuk have gathered blood samples from hundreds of Uighurs — part of a mass DNA collection effort dogged by questions about consent and how the data will be used.

In Tumxuk, at least, there is a partial answer: Chinese scientists are trying to find a way to use a DNA sample to create an image of a person’s face.

The technology, which is also being developed in the United States and elsewhere, is in the early stages of development and can produce rough pictures good enough only to narrow a manhunt or perhaps eliminate suspects. But given the crackdown in Xinjiang, experts on ethics in science worry that China is building a tool that could be used to justify and intensify racial profiling and other state discrimination against Uighurs.

In the long term, experts say, it may even be possible for the Communist government to feed images produced from a DNA sample into the mass surveillance and facial recognition systems that it is building, tightening its grip on society by improving its ability to track dissidents and protesters as well as criminals.

Some of this research is taking place in labs run by China’s Ministry of Public Security, and at least two Chinese scientists working with the ministry on the technology have received funding from respected institutions in Europe. International scientific journals have published their findings without examining the origin of the DNA used in the studies or vetting the ethical questions raised by collecting such samples in Xinjiang.

In papers, the Chinese scientists said they followed norms set by international associations of scientists, which would require that the men in Tumxuk (pronounced TUM-shook) gave their blood willingly. But in Xinjiang, many people have no choice. The government collects samples under the veneer of a mandatory health checkup program, according to Uighurs who have fled the country. Those placed in internment camps — two of which are in Tumxuk — also have little choice.

The police prevented reporters from The New York Times from interviewing Tumxuk residents, making verifying consent impossible. Many residents had vanished in any case. On the road to one of the internment camps, an entire neighborhood had been bulldozed into rubble.

The Daily Poster

Listen to ‘The Daily’: ‘Absolutely No Mercy’

Secret speeches and leaked government documents reveal how Chinese officials carried out the systematic internment of as many as a million people.
bars
0:00/25:37
-25:37

transcript

Listen to ‘The Daily’: ‘Absolutely No Mercy’

Hosted by Michael Barbaro; produced by Annie Brown and Jonathan Wolfe; with help from Jazmín Aguilera; and edited by Lisa Chow and M.J. Davis Lin

Secret speeches and leaked government documents reveal how Chinese officials carried out the systematic internment of as many as a million people.

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Today: A secret trove of government documents offers an unprecedented look inside China’s highly organized crackdown on Uighur Muslims. In one of them, China’s president orders his subordinates to show, quote, “absolutely no mercy.”

It’s Tuesday, December 10.

archived recording

Well, now The New York Times has obtained leaked Chinese government documents it says reveal new details about the crackdown on Muslim Uighurs in the Xinjiang region. They include instructions to local —

michael barbaro

Paul Mozur, tell me about these leaked documents from inside the Chinese government.

archived recording

Troves of classified documents reportedly leaked from within China’s Communist Party. The New York Times —

paul mozur

So the thing you have to understand is, China is one of the most powerful countries in the world, but we know very little about the top politics and how the country works, in so many ways. It’s a great secret. You have the Chinese Communist Party, which rules over the country but doesn’t really let anybody get behind the curtain to understand what’s going on. And so this leak —

archived recording

403 pages of documents about the concentration camps there.

paul mozur

You just don’t see this kind of thing happen.

michael barbaro

So somebody took a tremendous risk in making these documents available to The Times.

paul mozur

Yes, untold risk, not just to themselves — to their family, to their friends.

michael barbaro

And beyond the unusualness of the scale of this leak, what is significant about the fact that this is coming directly from the government?

paul mozur

So prior to this, the best proof we had of what was happening was mostly anecdotal. So you would talk to relatives of people who had been imprisoned, like, for instance, Ferkat, and maybe you’d be able to talk to somebody like his mother, who had been through the system, but you had no real hard proof. And Beijing used that to its benefit to basically come up with a very different version of reality, one in which this was an attempt to very gently teach Uighurs Chinese and to guide them away from extremism, and that this was a beneficial act by the government to raise up a minority that was lost in poverty and radical Islam. And with these documents, in these 403 pages, we see that even as the government is saying this, internally, they have a completely different calculus. And it’s one of punishment, and it’s one of indoctrination, to bring an entire ethnic minority to heel.

michael barbaro

O.K., so take us through how these documents lay all that out.

paul mozur

So there’s basically three major takeaways from these documents. And the first and probably the most important is that the architecture and the ideas behind this crackdown come from the very top. They come from Chinese President Xi Jinping himself.

Long before any camps had opened in the region, in 2014, Xi Jinping goes to Xinjiang. And in the documents, what we see is, in secret speeches and internal discussions, he lays the groundwork for a truly ferocious crackdown.

michael barbaro

And what would be the instigation for that crackdown? What would be the rationale in 2014?

archived recording

Xinjiang has seen a spate of deadly attacks recently, where Muslim Uighur separatists seek autonomy from Beijing.

paul mozur

So 2014 is a particularly bloody year in what has been just a longtime conflict between Uighurs and Han Chinese.

archived recording

43 people killed when a bomb detonated in a market in the regional capital of Urumqi.

paul mozur

Just weeks before Xi Jinping makes this trip —

archived recording

China’s state media reports 27 people are dead after mass stabbings at a train station.

paul mozur

— There is a Uighur militant attack at a train station in southern China, where Uighurs go in with knives and stab 150 people. And then on the last day of Xi’s visit to Xinjiang —

archived recording

It’s the second time this station’s been targeted in two months.

paul mozur

— there’s a car bomb that goes off at the train station in Urumqi, the capital of the region.

michael barbaro

Hm.

archived recording

Beijing blames this violence on separatists from the mainly Muslim Uighur minority.

paul mozur

So you have these attacks, and they’re getting larger in scale. And so as a leader, he’s watching this happen and trying to figure out how to deal with it.

And so he does something that I think would be surprising to a lot of people, but what happens a lot within China and its leadership. He looks to the United States.

michael barbaro

Hm.

paul mozur

He says that Chinese officials should study the American response to the September 11 attacks. And I think this gives you a sense of the sense of crisis he felt, even though, in comparison, the 9/11 attacks are so much of a larger scale than what’s happening in China at that moment. And so what he says is, basically, we are going to have an all-out war against terrorism, infiltration and separatism. And he says this very chilling thing. He says, we must use the “organs of dictatorship” and show “absolutely no mercy” in how we fight back against this.

He likens Islamic extremism to a virus and a contagion, and one of the quotes goes, basically, “people who are captured by religious extremism” have “their consciences destroyed.” They “lose their humanity and murder without blinking an eye.” And he calls for treating the contagion with a period of painful interventionary treatment.

michael barbaro

Hm.

paul mozur

So effectively, this is a doctor or a surgeon going in and cutting something out that is a problem.

michael barbaro

So Xi Jinping is making the intellectual case, basically, for camps, for detention, for active repression.

paul mozur

Right. And within months, we see indoctrination sites start to open. And these hold dozens or maybe a couple hundred people.

michael barbaro

Hm.

paul mozur

And they have classes, which basically teach people to disavow Islam, or profess their gratitude for the Chinese Communist Party. Which brings us to the second big takeaway from these documents, which is how these small camps evolve into this tremendously complex and large-scale system of concentration camps and prisons that we see scattered across the region today.

michael barbaro

And how is that? What do the documents show?

paul mozur

They show a trajectory that is led by a single man, Chen Quanguo.

This official, Chen Quanguo, is known as a hardliner, and he’s been in Tibet for about five years. And during this period, he installs police stations across the major cities and across the region to gain really strong control over the ethnic minority Tibetan population there. So he’s seen as a guy who had a solution to a problem in another part of China that has a similar issue with an ethnic minority that resents Chinese rule. And the idea is, he could do it once, maybe he can do it again.

michael barbaro

Hm.

paul mozur

In August of 2016, this official is transferred from his post in Tibet to take over in Xinjiang. And he calls for local officials to carry out an obliterating offensive. And one of his orders, I think, is very telling and also very chilling. He says, “Round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

Any kind of sign of religious devotion becomes something that you can be rounded up for. So issues like people who would pray regularly, people who have a Quran at home, men who grow long beards or who advise against smoking or drinking, people who study Arabic, and also, importantly, people who have ties overseas or relatives who are studying overseas. So that’s the plan, but it doesn’t go all that smoothly. As these orders come down, lower-level officials aren’t implementing them the way Chen Quanguo wants. In some cases, they are helping shelter Uighurs and letting them out of camps. In some cases, they’re not putting as many in the camps as Chen Quanguo would want. And so there’s a real resistance in some ways to the severity and strictness of what’s coming from the top.

michael barbaro

And why would that be? Given everything that you have explained, why would these lower-level officials not carry out the orders that they have been given?

paul mozur

So China is very authoritarian, but it’s also not a monolith. And what I mean by that is that the top officials will set goals, and then lower officials have to carry them out. But oftentimes, lower officials are judged by a different set of metrics — in particular, economic growth. And so in this case, a lot of local officials were looking at these new guidelines that said to throw a fifth of the population into camps and saying, well, there’s no way I can grow the economy at the level I need to and also do this. This is just unrealistic. And so they started to undermine what these rules were. And so we see very specific examples laid out in the documents of how officials grumble privately about this exact problem.

michael barbaro

And so how does this new leader in the region respond to all this resistance, basically this failure to carry out this crackdown?

paul mozur

He punishes the officials that aren’t seen to be carrying out his orders. He opens up investigations into thousands and thousands of them. Many are sent to jail, and they’re made to sign confessions before they go. And then he takes those confessions, and he spreads those around to the officials as a warning, saying, these guys, they didn’t listen to my orders, and now they’re in jail. And it’s breathtaking, the level of fear, not just in the Uighur population but in the population of officials that are having to enact it. Because even if they don’t want to enact it, they no longer have a choice. They’re stuck.

michael barbaro

So now, with all of this opposition essentially wiped away, what happens to the camp system in Xinjiang?

paul mozur

It begins to grow utterly unimpeded.

So you started with small camps in cities, maybe schools that were repurposed to hold people. Now we see large concentration camps going up outside of cities, where you have maybe a dozen buildings, each possibly holding thousands of people. And we see new lots that are then filled in again and again, to the point where you just have probably more than 1,000 of these camps around the region.

michael barbaro

Wow.

paul mozur

The prison system as well starts to fill up, and so the prison system is expanded, and there’s overcrowding there. We see hundreds of thousands of convictions, with people being thrown into prisons. And ultimately, the last phase of this is the labor camp. So either a factory goes in, or a fence and a road is built to a factory. And we start to see people being siphoned out into these factories. And this is the idea of how you would graduate from one of these camps is, you would eventually return not to your hometown but to a factory town, where you work in a factory in compulsive labor. And so all of this together, by 2018, is just taking a tremendous toll on the entire region. When you go there, the streets are empty. People are clearly scared. Businesses are shut down. Mosques are all locked up. Nobody dares go near them, and they’re closed anyway. People are being taken away at night. And ultimately, a million to 3 million people have been swept up into this system.

michael barbaro

Hm.

I mean, Paul, what’s staggering about that number is that even in a country as big as China, it’s hard to fathom more than a million people suddenly disappearing from their homes and their streets. What is the story that China tells to explain that?

paul mozur

Yeah, and that leads us to the third major takeaway from the documents, which is how the Chinese government methodically tried to hide that all of this was happening.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

So Paul, what do these secret documents show us about how the Chinese government somehow hides this all from its own people?

paul mozur

One of the biggest things they’re worried about is actually students. So a large number of Uighur students go out from Xinjiang each year to go to college all over China. And so within the documents, they’re specifically worried about those children returning home for the summer, seeing their home just transformed and their relatives missing, and then spreading news about it across apps like WeChat and other social media, and talking about the problem. And so what they do is they come up with this incredibly bureaucratic guide.

It’s basically a manual for how to deal with these kids who have a lot of questions about the missing relatives, and the empty streets, and the locked mosques.

michael barbaro

And what does the manual say should be done? I wonder if you could read from it.

paul mozur

Yeah, sure. So it’s called “Tactics for Answering Questions Asked by the Children of Concentrated Education and Training School Students.” And the first question is a very simple one. “Where are my family members?” And the answer goes, “They’re in a training school set up by the government to undergo collective systematic training, study and instruction. They have very good conditions for studying and living there, and you have nothing to worry about. Tuition for their period of study is free, and so are food and living costs. And the standards are quite high.”

michael barbaro

Hm.

paul mozur

“Our officials accompany them at study every day, offering counseling and assistance, and they eat the same food and live in the same dormitories. So you have absolutely no need to worry about how they’re doing. If you want to see them, we can arrange for you to have a live video meeting.”

michael barbaro

Wow. That’s positively Orwellian.

paul mozur

Yeah.

michael barbaro

So in this telling, these re-education camps, they’re a gift to the people in them. Their life is good. The food is wonderful. The tuition is free.

paul mozur

Right. Everything is great. There’s nothing to worry about. This is a school, and things are good. And so then, as you go down the list, it anticipates people pushing a little bit. So question number four is, “Since it’s just training, why can’t they come home?”

michael barbaro

Mm-hmm.

paul mozur

And the answer is, “It seems that you’re still misunderstanding how concentrated education is run. Usually, you would return home for winter or summer vacation without any problem. But if you were careless and caught an infectious virus, like SARS, you’d have to undergo enclosed isolated treatment, because it’s an infectious illness. If you weren’t thoroughly cured, as soon as you returned home, you would infect your family with the virus, and your whole family would fall ill. The party and government would not be so irresponsible that they would let a member of your family go home before their illness was cured and thinking thoroughly transformed, a situation in which they would do harm to others.”

michael barbaro

So here the mission is being described with a little bit more candor. We think something is wrong with these people, and we will not return them home until it’s been fixed.

paul mozur

Exactly. And again, we come back to that language of illness, the idea that this is infectious, and that people have to be isolated and the problem with them eradicated. And then, as you go down, it starts to deal with, well, if the students are pushing harder, if they seem like they suspect something’s up, then you start moving more towards threats.

michael barbaro

Hm.

paul mozur

And that becomes apparent in one of the questions: “When can my family member graduate and leave school?” And the answer says that the family members must be diligent in their studies, abide by the school rules, and do outstandingly in morning exercises, chores, dining, study and so on. And family members, including you, must abide by the state’s laws and rules, and not believe or spread rumors, and take an active part in collective life. Only then can you add points for your family member. And after a period of assessment, they can leave the school, if they meet course completion standards.

michael barbaro

And Paul, what are these points that this passage refers to?

paul mozur

So another really important thing that comes from the documents, it lays out how there is a point system for getting through the camps, and that if you act out or if there are problems, you lose points. And if your family members act out, you can also lose points. And if you go below a certain threshold, then one year of study — quote, unquote, “study” — turns into two, or turns into three.

michael barbaro

Hmm. So the concept here is, complain too loudly about your missing relative, and your missing relative may be missing for even longer. You have the power to make this better, or you have the power to make this worse for them.

paul mozur

Exactly. And this is why Ferkat is so unique, because he goes the opposite way. He speaks out, and continues to speak out. And many people in his community in the United States are afraid to speak out. And they’re not afraid for themselves. They’re in the United States. They’re afraid for their family members, and they’re afraid the punishments that will come down on them or that other family members could be thrown into camps for what they’re saying and doing. And Ferkat’s point in all this is that this whole system is bogus, that you should not sit back and hope that silence will secure a release for your family members, because it won’t. This is just an intimidation tactic. And all along, the kind of punitive measures are going to be worked out anyway. So you might as well go out and talk.

michael barbaro

Right, because this system hinges on silence, on people’s belief and their fear that unless they are anything other than silent, it will all get worse.

paul mozur

Exactly. And that’s why, I think, Ferkat told us that once he had no more fears, he felt like he had power, because that was when he could speak up and speak out and say, this is what’s happening, and it needs to stop.

michael barbaro

Paul, what has happened since The Times published these 400 or so pages of internal documents? What has been the response from the international community that has consumed everything that you’ve just described?

paul mozur

Not a lot. You get some condemnations from some quarters, but the rest of the world is basically quiet about this, because China is such an important global player, and they fear the consequences.

And so I talked to Ferkat about that.

ferkat jawdat

We have been speaking the same things for a couple years, but many of them, they still trust the Chinese government, even though there are really strong facts.

paul mozur

And I think for him, it’s just both baffling and infuriating. Because he’s fighting this propaganda war where the Chinese government keeps saying these things don’t exist or aren’t as we’ve described them, and now you have the proof. You have it.

ferkat jawdat

And then the first feeling I had is, just bring the document and then slap on the face of country leaders, and then tell them, this is the proof that you needed.

paul mozur

He wanted to take this pile of documents and basically use it to slap the faces of the leaders who continue to do nothing about this across the globe.

ferkat jawdat

It is the time that you have to speak out.

paul mozur

He said, what more does the world need?

ferkat jawdat

Like, what else do you need? Do you need — do you want to see the pile of bodies piled up as a mountain and then you’re going to speak up? What are you waiting for?

paul mozur

Do they need a pile of bodies in front of them in order to act? What are they waiting for?

michael barbaro

Paul, thank you very much.

paul mozur

Thanks, Michael.

michael barbaro

We’ll be right back.

Here’s what else you need to know today. A long-awaited report from the inspector general of the Justice Department has found no evidence that the F.B.I. engaged in a politically biased investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, and that the F.B.I. had sufficient grounds to open the investigation in the first place. The report, released on Monday, debunks the president’s repeated claim that the investigation was an illegal conspiracy carried out by his enemies. But the report did criticize the F.B.I. for its handling of a controversial wiretap used to monitor a Trump campaign adviser, Carter Page. It found that the documents filed to justify the wiretaps contained significant omissions, inaccuracies and claims not backed up by supporting evidence.

And a secret history of the U.S. war in Afghanistan reveals that American officials misled the public about the state of the conflict, manipulated data, and concealed evidence that the war was unwinnable. The history, obtained by The Washington Post, includes an interview with a three-star general who oversaw the war for President George W. Bush and President Obama. In it, the general said, quote, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan. We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.

Video
New York Times reporters in Tumxuk recorded video of a large number of destroyed Uighur buildings along a road that led to a re-education camp.CreditCredit...Videos by Paul Mozur

Growing numbers of scientists and human rights activists say the Chinese government is exploiting the openness of the international scientific community to harness research into the human genome for questionable purposes.

Already, China is exploring using facial recognition technology to sort people by ethnicity. It is also researching how to use DNA to tell if a person is a Uighur. Research on the genetics behind the faces of Tumxuk’s men could help bridge the two.

The Chinese government is building “essentially technologies used for hunting people,” said Mark Munsterhjelm, an assistant professor at the University of Windsor in Ontario who tracks Chinese interest in the technology.

In the world of science, Dr. Munsterhjelm said, “there’s a kind of culture of complacency that has now given way to complicity.”

Sketching someone’s face based solely on a DNA sample sounds like science fiction. It isn’t.

The process is called DNA phenotyping. Scientists use it to analyze genes for traits like skin color, eye color and ancestry. A handful of companies and scientists are trying to perfect the science to create facial images sharp and accurate enough to identify criminals and victims.

The Maryland police used it last year to identify a murder victim. In 2015, the police in North Carolina arrested a man on two counts of murder after crime-scene DNA indicated the killer had fair skin, brown or hazel eyes, dark hair, and little evidence of freckling. The man pleaded guilty.

Despite such examples, experts widely question phenotyping’s effectiveness. Currently, it often produces facial images that are too smooth or indistinct to look like the face being replicated. DNA cannot indicate other factors that determine how people look, such as age or weight. DNA can reveal gender and ancestry, but the technology can be hit or miss when it comes to generating an image as specific as a face.

Phenotyping also raises ethical issues, said Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The police could use it to round up large numbers of people who resemble a suspect, or use it to target ethnic groups. And the technology raises fundamental issues of consent from those who never wanted to be in a database to begin with.

“What the Chinese government is doing should be a warning to everybody who kind of goes along happily thinking, ‘How could anyone be worried about these technologies?’” Dr. Ossorio said.

With the ability to reconstruct faces, the Chinese police would have yet another genetic tool for social control. The authorities have already gathered millions of DNA samples in Xinjiang. They have also collected data from the hundreds of thousands of Uighurs and members of other minority groups locked up in detention camps in Xinjiang as part of a campaign to stop terrorism. Chinese officials have depicted the camps as benign facilities that offer vocational training, though documents describe prisonlike conditions, while testimonies from many who have been inside cite overcrowding and torture.

Image
Images from a 2018 study on age estimation and age-related facial reconstruction of Uighur men by analyzing 3-D facial images.Credit...Journal of Forensic Medicine

Even beyond the Uighurs, China has the world’s largest DNA database, with more than 80 million profiles as of July, according to Chinese news reports.

“If I were to find DNA at a crime scene, the first thing I would do is to find a match in the 80 million data set,” said Peter Claes, an imaging specialist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, who has studied DNA-based facial reconstruction for a decade. “But what do you do if you don’t find a match?”

Though the technology is far from accurate, he said, “DNA phenotyping can bring a solution.”

To unlock the genetic mysteries behind the human face, the police in China turned to Chinese scientists with connections to leading institutions in Europe.

One of them was Tang Kun, a specialist in human genetic diversity at the Shanghai-based Partner Institute for Computational Biology, which was founded in part by the Max Planck Society, a top research group in Germany.

The German organization also provided $22,000 a year in funding to Dr. Tang because he conducted research at an institute affiliated with it, said Christina Beck, a spokeswoman for the Max Planck Society. Dr. Tang said the grant had run out before he began working with the police, according to Dr. Beck.

Another expert involved in the research was Liu Fan, a professor at the Beijing Institute of Genomics who is also an adjunct assistant professor at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

Both were named as authors of a 2018 study on Uighur faces in the journal Hereditas (Beijing), published by the government-backed Chinese Academy of Sciences. They were also listed as authors of a study examining DNA samples taken last year from 612 Uighurs in Tumxuk that appeared in April in Human Genetics, a journal published by Springer Nature, which also publishes the influential journal Nature.

Both papers named numerous other authors, including Li Caixia, chief forensic scientist at the Ministry of Public Security.

In an interview, Dr. Tang said he did not know why he was named as an author of the April paper, though he said it might have been because his graduate students worked on it. He said he had ended his affiliation with the Chinese police in 2017 because he felt their biological samples and research were subpar.

“To be frank, you overestimate how genius the Chinese police is,” said Dr. Tang, who had recently shut down a business focused on DNA testing and ancestry.

Like other geneticists, Dr. Tang has long been fascinated by Uighurs because their mix of European and East Asian features can help scientists identify genetic variants associated with physical traits. In his earlier studies, he said, he collected blood samples himself from willing subjects.

Dr. Tang said the police approached him in 2016, offering access to DNA samples and funding. At the time, he was a professor at the Partner Institute for Computational Biology, which is run by the Chinese Academy of Sciences but was founded in 2005 in part with funding from the Max Planck Society and still receives some grants and recommendations for researchers from the German group.

Dr. Beck, the Max Planck spokeswoman, said Dr. Tang had told the organization that he began working with the police in 2017, after it had stopped funding his research a year earlier.

But an employment ad on a government website suggests the relationship began earlier. The Ministry of Public Security placed the ad in 2016 seeking a researcher to help explore the “DNA of physical appearance traits.” It said the person would report to Dr. Tang and to Dr. Li, the ministry’s chief forensic scientist.

Dr. Tang did not respond to additional requests for comment. The Max Planck Society said Dr. Tang had not reported his work with the police as required while holding a position at the Partner Institute, which he did not leave until last year.

The Max Planck Society “takes this issue very seriously” and will ask its ethics council to review the matter, Dr. Beck said.

It is not clear when Dr. Liu, the assistant professor at Erasmus University Medical Center, began working with the Chinese police. Dr. Liu says in his online résumé that he is a visiting professor at the Ministry of Public Security at a lab for “on-site traceability technology.”

In 2015, while holding a position with Erasmus, he also took a post at the Beijing Institute of Genomics. Two months later, the Beijing institute signed an agreement with the Chinese police to establish an innovation center to study cutting-edge technologies “urgently needed by the public security forces,” according to the institute’s website.

Dr. Liu did not respond to requests for comment.

Erasmus said that Dr. Liu remained employed by the university as a part-time researcher and that his position in China was “totally independent” of the one in the Netherlands. It added that Dr. Liu had not received any funding from the university for the research papers, though he listed his affiliation with Erasmus on the studies. Erasmus made inquiries about his research and determined there was no need for further action, according to a spokeswoman.

Erasmus added that it could not be held responsible “for any research that has not taken place under the auspices of Erasmus” by Dr. Liu, even though it continued to employ him.

Still, Dr. Liu’s work suggests that sources of funding could be mingled.

In September, he was one of seven authors of a paper on height in Europeans published in the journal Forensic Science International. The paper said it was backed by a grant from the European Union — and by a grant from China’s Ministry of Public Security.

Dr. Tang said he was unaware of the origins of the DNA samples examined in the two papers, the 2018 paper in Hereditas (Beijing) and the Human Genetics paper published in April. The publishers of the papers said they were unaware, too.

Hereditas (Beijing) did not respond to a request for comment. Human Genetics said it had to trust scientists who said they had received informed consent from donors. Local ethics committees are generally responsible for verifying that the rules were followed, it said.

Springer Nature said on Monday that it had strengthened its guidelines on papers involving vulnerable groups of people and that it would add notes of concern to previously published papers.

In the papers, the authors said their methods had been approved by the ethics committee of the Institute of Forensic Science of China. That organization is part of the Ministry of Public Security, China’s police.

With 161,000 residents, most of them Uighurs, the agricultural settlement of Tumxuk is governed by the powerful Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps, a quasi-military organization formed by decommissioned soldiers sent to Xinjiang in the 1950s to develop the region.

Image
Images from a study in April on how gene variants influence facial morphology in a Eurasian population.Credit...Human Genetics
Image
Credit...Human Genetics

The state news media described Tumxuk, which is dotted with police checkpoints, as one of the “gateways and major battlefields for Xinjiang’s security work.”

In January 2018, the town got a high-tech addition: a forensic DNA lab run by the Institute of Forensic Science of China, the same police research group responsible for the work on DNA phenotyping.

Procurement documents showed the lab relied on software systems made by Thermo Fisher Scientific, a Massachusetts company, to work with genetic sequencers that analyze DNA fragments. Thermo Fisher announced in February that it would suspend sales to the region, saying in a statement that it had decided to do so after undertaking “fact-specific assessments.”

For the Human Genetics study, samples were processed by a higher-end sequencer made by an American firm, Illumina, according to the authors. It is not clear who owned the sequencer. Illumina did not respond to requests for comment.

The police sought to prevent two Times reporters from conducting interviews in Tumxuk, stopping them upon arrival at the airport for interrogation. Government minders then tailed the reporters and later forced them to delete all photos, audio and video recordings taken on their phones in Tumxuk.

Uighurs and human rights groups have said the authorities collected DNA samples, images of irises and other personal data during mandatory health checks.

In an interview, Zhou Fang, the head of the health commission in Tumxuk, said residents voluntarily accepted free health checks under a public health program known as Physicals for All and denied that DNA samples were collected.

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” he said.

The questions angered Zhao Hai, the deputy head of Tumxuk’s foreign affairs office. He called a Times reporter “shameless” for asking a question linking the health checks with the collection of DNA samples.

“Do you think America has the ability to do these free health checks?” he asked. “Only the Communist Party can do that!”

Sui-Lee Wee is a China correspondent. She was part of the team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in public service for coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. More about Sui-Lee Wee

Paul Mozur is a correspondent focused on technology and geopolitics in Asia. He was part of a team that won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in public service for coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. More about Paul Mozur

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: China Mines DNA To Map Out Faces With West’s Help. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT