The Battle Over Big Data

China is aggressively trying to control much of the world's data. How president Biden responds will have broad implications for the economy and privacy

- By Adam Piore

FEW CASES BETTER SHOW HOW U.S.- China relations have deteriorated in the age of Big Data than the response Wang Jiang got when he offered, at the height of the pandemic, to set up labs for COVID-19 testing in the U.S.

Wang is a known quantity in the world of U.S. biotech. He cut his teeth as a genetics researcher at the major public research universities of Texas, Iowa, and Washington. He's now the snowy-haired, charismatic chairman of Shenzen-based BGI, the world's largest biotech company, which for decades has been collaborating with some of America's leading geneticists. BGI participated in the global effort to sequence the first human genome, formed a partnership with the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia to identify genes associated with pediatric diseases, and named an institute in China after Harvard's George Church, a gene-editing pioneer, who continues to work with the company.

But Wang's offer ran afoul of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, which issued a stark warning: "Foreign powers can collect, store and exploit biometric information from COVID tests." The Trump Administration's top U.S. counterintelligence official, Bill Evanina, later told 60 Minutes that the labs were "modern-day Trojan horses," an effort by the Chinese government to establish a "foothold" to bring in equipment, collect DNA and start "mining your data." No one in the U.S. took BGI up on its offer.