The Internationalization of the Chinese Communist Party’s Shāshǒujiǎn (杀手锏) Unconventional Warfare Doctrine and Bioweapons Proliferation Risks

RYAN CLARKE, LJ EADS, XIAOXU SEAN LIN

Key Findings

1. China faces multiple conventional military shortfalls relative to American/Allied Forces without any near-term remedies. In response to this reality, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its armed wing, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), have invested heavily in a range of asymmetric weapons and covert action programs in the next frontier battlespace with bioweapons platforms being the top priority.

2. The CCP shows no signs of modifying or reversing its strategic intent to target, degrade and eventually dissolve the United States, conquer Taiwan, dominate the Indo-Pacific and re-engineer a new ‘international system’ based on Beijing’s dominance and absolute control. The United States is the primary obstacle that prevents these adverse developments from occurring, a strategic reality which infuriates the CCP.

3. The CCP and its PLA are also keenly aware that Beijing lacks conventional military options to achieve any of these strategic goals under traditional battlefield conditions with standard kinetic weapons platforms. As such, they have assessed that their only option to achieve their strategic aims is through ‘no rules’ unconventional warfare against the key ‘control points’ of the American system at home, specifically through the use of bioweapons and leveraging ‘lessons learned’ from the chaos caused by COVID-19 inside the United States. When faced with new strategic challenges, the CCP has reached back into its own military history and has adapted an ancient asymmetric warfare doctrine, Shāshǒujiǎn (杀手锏).

4. Shāshǒujiǎn roughly translates into English as ‘Assassin’s Mace’. It is an ancient Chinese strategic concept that is focused on identifying key unmitigated vulnerabilities in the overall combat power and comprehensive national strength of an enemy state with superior capabilities, which in this case is the United States. These conventional vulnerabilities are then precision targeted with zero early warning with the strategic intent to shock and rapidly paralyze an enemy’s ability to process events and respond effectively.

5. Years of our research has clearly demonstrated that the modern application of the CCP’s Shāshǒujiǎn-focused weapons development and strategy can be directly observed in the unconventional domain area, including capabilities that would qualify as Weapons of Mass Destruction programs. CCP and PLA research and planning is focused on the most efficacious Shāshǒujiǎn bioweapons, targets, and order of operations to cause the severe disruption and collapse of American society, thereby paralyzing key segments of the country and hindering political decision making and military responses.

6. All available evidence suggests the CCP presents a higher set of strategic proliferation risks when compared to the pre-COVID-19 period. The CCP without question has developed and now possesses the most dangerous and offensively oriented bioweapons program in human history with the associated proliferation risks regarding Russia, Pakistan, Iran as well as state-backed terrorist groups such as Lashkar-i-Taiba, Hizballah, Hamas, Houthis, Islamic Jihad or a range of other non-state threat networks.

With recent evidence emerging that the Russian Federation is restarting many of its key Soviet-era bioweapons sites, Iran’s possession of a fentanyl-based chemical weapons stockpile, and the surfacing of a Chinese bioweapons lab in Pakistan, it is clear that these CCP-origin proliferation risks are now accelerating with strategic implications for both American national security as well as international security.

8. In 2015, then-president of the Academy of Military Medical Sciences (AMMS) He Fuchu (贺福初) argued that biotechnology will become the new ‘strategic commanding heights’ of national defense, from biomaterials to ‘brain control’ weapons. In addition, the 2017 edition of Science of Military Strategy (战略 学), a textbook published by the PLA’s National Defense University that is considered to be authoritative, debuted a section about biology as a domain of military struggle, mentioning the potential for new kinds of biological warfare to include ‘specific ethnic genetic attacks.’

9. Bioweapons are part of the CCP’s standard order of battle; not an unconventional set of capabilities only to be used under extreme circumstances. This represents a fundamental difference in strategic thinking regarding these domains in Beijing. This is not a hypothetical point. There was a sharp statistical increase in Chinese military activity in the South China Sea, East China Sea, Taiwan Straits, and along the Sino-Indian border during the most acute phases of the COVID-19 outbreak in 2020 and 2021.

10. In January 2024, the highest-risk SARS-CoV-2 experiment to date was carried out in Beijing that generated a synthetic SARS-CoV-2 virus that has 100% lethality. This involved researchers from:

• Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Soft Matter (BAIC-SM) Science and Engineering (Beijing University of Chemical Technology)

• Research Center for Clinical Medicine (The Fifth Medical Center of PLA General Hospital)

• State Key Laboratory of Pharmaceutical Biotechnology (Nanjing University)

This study was conducted using technology platforms developed by Beijing SpePharm Biotechnology Company.

11. A newly operational bioweapons lab facility has been surfaced that is jointly run by the CCP’s Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) and the Defense Science and Technology Organization (DESTO), which is a military facility under the direct control of the Pakistan Army.

12. There is a material risk of any jointly developed bioweapons being down-streamed to Pakistan-backed terrorist groups to conduct mass-casualty atrocities while providing Pakistan with the same type of plausible deniability that the CCP has sought to maintain. This is despite overwhelming evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was the result of a lab leak at the ‘old’ WIV in central Wuhan.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia’s bioweapons and chemical weapons programs largely collapsed with funding structures evaporating along with the scientific manpower base. Over the past several decades, these programs functioned at a minimal level and at a fraction of their previous capacity. However, it has become clear that Moscow has begun to make new strategic investments in facility redevelopment and (possibly) new facility construction in the future.

14. Despite these developments, Russia has largely been ‘out of the game’ in this domain area and therefore would be starting out immeasurably behind the curve in terms of state-of-the-art. Russia also currently faces a critical shortfall in highly trained scientists and other personnel who are capable out carrying out this highly skilled and dangerous work. For the resurgent Russian bioweapons and chemical weapons programs to be of material strategic consequence, they will need to acquire ‘leapfrog’ capabilities. The source of these leapfrog capabilities is likely the CCP and PLA.

15. As the conventional battlefield in Ukraine remains largely in a land-based stalemate with neither country possessing new options to fundamentally reshape battlefield conditions, Russia finds itself in a very difficult situation. The Russian Armed Forces and its non-state proxies, such as the Wagner Group, have suffered casualty rates that have not been witnessed since WWI and WWII.

16. While Russia is in the process of mobilizing its next wave of troops, this mobilization will be Russia’s last. The combination of combat deaths and military-age Russian males fleeing the country has placed Russia on a direct path to demographic catastrophe over the medium term. The Kremlin is undoubtedly aware of this mathematical reality. The restarting of Russia’s Soviet-era bioweapons and chemical weapons infrastructure should be understood within this broader strategic context.

17. Despite numerous threats made by Putin and other Russian leaders to use nuclear weapons in the Ukraine conflict, there has been little evidence that Russian force postures were ever adjusted for this scenario. Any Russian use of a nuclear weapons would also almost certainly result in a massive retaliatory response by the United States and NATO (although not necessarily nuclear) and the end of the Putin regime and, possibly, the current form of the Russian Federation. There is no way for Putin to obfuscate the point of origin of the use of a nuclear weapon.

18. However, bioweapons and chemical weapons provide this capability, especially the stealth platforms that have been developed by the CCP. Russia and China have a well-established track record in strategic cooperation across the full spectrum of defense cooperation in both conventional (i.e. air defense systems) and unconventional (i.e. direct energy weapons) domains.

19. Russia has the clearly articulated ‘demand’ for state-of-the-art stealth bioweapons and biochemical weapons capabilities as well as the strategic ‘case’ for them to be deployed (or threatened to be deployed for deterrence purposes) under both battlefield and covert conditions. Given the depth of Russian intelligence networks inside the United States as well as key American Allies, such as the United Kingdom, these risks should have an added degree of urgency.

The CCP is likely unconcerned over the prospect of being ‘drug into’ Iranian-instigated conflicts that do not directly involve Chinese interests in the Middle East, such as in Lebanon, Gaza, Yemen and/or Israel itself. China has effectively managed an analogous situation (in principle) in neighboring Pakistan for decades and likely feels confident that Iran will not pose a level of complexity that Beijing cannot control.

21. However, if Iranian regular forces and/or proxies engage in actions that have a more generic effect of directly harming Israel and/or distracting American attention, this would be viewed as a zero-cost/high-return action by the CCP. The CCP has taken the same approach with Pakistan. China’s likely transfer of fentanyl-based chemical weapons to Iran should likely be understood within this context.

22. Iran’s recent missile barrages and other conventional military actions have fallen flat and have exposed major gaps and weaknesses. Tehran’s non-state proxies have faced major setbacks as well and have been massively degraded in-theater. Tehran appears to have realized this and, like Russia, has opted to quickly obtain offensively oriented unconventional weapons, most likely from the CCP. With Iranian-hacked Hizballah (for example) networks spanning the Middle East, Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States itself, these risks are acute.

23. All of these CCP directly transferable bioweapons and chemical weapons programs have one commonality: they are zero-warning Shāshǒujiǎn offensive capabilities that are designed to shock and paralyze a target population/s while seeking to obfuscate the point of origin of the attack itself.

24. The CCP tracked the strategic impacts that the COVID-19 pandemic had on the United States and its Allies in a high level of detail. The lessons that the CCP has likely drawn is that bioweapons and chemical weapons present the CCP and/or other state/non-state proxies with a range of immediately executable asymmetric options for which the United States may not have an adequate response.

25. This is especially true when these capabilities are paired with the CCP’s nanotechnology platforms, some of which are specifically designed for long-range delivery. All this technical knowhow and capability can be directly transferred to other hostile states that have the core physical infrastructure, at least a skeleton of a domestic scientific base and hostile strategic intent. All these conditions directly apply to Russia, Pakistan and Iran – a true internationalization of Shāshǒujiǎn and proliferation of bioweapons capabilities to all of America’s major adversaries.