Maintenance of the LIO is necessary to prevent China from setting standards for biotechnology.

Moreover, if some authorities in China are reluctant to cede moral authority to the global hegemon (i.e., the U.S. and its traditional close allies) in the norms of science, they wouldn’t be the first. For years, a scattered alliance of South American bioethicists has called for a “hard bioethics,” a kind of weaponizing of the field, such as protesting N.I.H. funded speakers’ appearance in Latin America to lecture on the rules of human research ethics. These critics argue that the North American agency’s actual purpose is to create a respectable environment for the scientific exploitation of bodies in the developing world (Moreno 2020).

As the smoke clears around the case of these edited embryos, it now seems clear that China will subscribe to the international governance efforts now underway, including forthcoming recommendations by a World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee. Notably, in the wake of the embarrassment of the gene-edited embryos—and before the emergence of the novel coronavirus—China released the draft of a new biosecurity law that focuses on laboratory safety and protections against bioterrorism and biological weapons. This law would cover roughly the same ground as dual-use research of concern (DURC) in the United States (Xinhua 2019).

An underlying complication is the tension between a globalized scientific community of which China is very much a part, as exemplified in the new dual-use law, and a governmental system that may have somewhat different goals. Perhaps China will ultimately propose its own rules as the basis for international standardization. In this way, it could assert itself as a leader in thinking about the ethics of genome modification as part of its role in defining a new international order. There is a precedent for this approach in a 2018 white paper on artificial intelligence (AI) by China’s Standards Administration that sets rules on AI safety, ethics, privacy. In the words of the white paper, “establishing policies, laws, and a standardized environment in which AI technologies benefit society and protect the public interest are important prerequisites for the continuous and healthy development of AI technology” (Ding and Trolo 2018). As though to embody the competition for leadership, in July 2019 the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology, in response to a presidential executive order, issued a draft plan to establish “AI standards that articulate requirements, specifications, guidelines, or characteristics can help to ensure that AI technologies and systems meet critical objectives for functionality, interoperability, and trustworthiness, and perform accurately, reliably and safely” (Huergo 2019).

Unlike the implications of advances of various forms of AI without a global standards regime, the risks of systematic, lab-based human germline modification are at best highly speculative. Skeptics about the weight of moral norms against deliberately modifying heritable traits might also note that such alterations might not only be imperceptible but would pale beside natural “de novo” variations that take place in each individual genome and are passed down through generations. But what counts as a natural variation? Unlike humans, rapidly propagating species like mosquitoes are not only vastly easier to modify in large numbers, they are also of far greater interest for population health.

Two areas of biotechnology that demand a vibrant international normative and institutional order are those of laboratory security and biological weapons. Managing the results of experiments in microbes and in animals through safe laboratory practices, regimens to monitor and control “dual use” research in select agents, and cooperation to prevent the creation of new and virulent threats as weapons of terror should continue to motivate nations to maintain a basic normative regime for biotechnology. Whether such a regime can co-exist with one in which values concerning human reproductive materials are viewed quite differently is at the moment both an open question and a stress test for the normative scope of the liberal international order.

Finally, any confidence about China’s commitment to international scientific norms of any sort has been shaken by the central government’s suppression of information about the spread of the coronavirus in late 2019. This and other longstanding aggressively nationalistic policies, from Tibet to Xinjiang to Hong Kong, raise grave doubts about its capacity for moral leadership of any stripe in any domain. An era of Chinese hegemony under the banner of a Middle Kingdom could someday create nostalgia for the LIO, for all its limitations.