Foreign companies need to be "restrained" from ownership of blood-product enterprises to prevent them from turning plasma into "genetic weapons," said deputies to the 13th National People's Congress (NPC) from Central China's Henan Province.



"Blood products are strategically important materials. They contain important genetic information," An Kang, chairman of Hualan Biological Engineering Inc, told the Global Times Sunday.



"A lethal method of genetic weapon is to take advantage of specific points of other nations' genomes and carry out destruction aimed at these points…thus we should prevent potentially severe results to our national security caused by genetic information losses," said An, without providing any specific example or evidence of such activities.



An warned that allowing foreign companies to buy domestic blood-product enterprises will likely cause losses of national strategic materials and threaten the safety of ethnicity data.



The key is to prevent foreign companies from accessing or using blood resource in domestic collection centers, An stressed in a motion submitted to the NPC.



"In line with the principle of national security and the safety of ethnic genetic information, [we should] restrain the highest ownership ratio that foreign companies can hold in Chinese blood-product industry," read the motion.



"[We should] also restrain the same foreign companies from investing in more than one Chinese blood-product enterprises to prevent them from becoming over influential in the Chinese blood-product industry," the motion said.



An submitted the motion with the support of four other Henan deputies.



Australian biotechnology manufacturer CSL acquired an 80 percent stake of Chinese plasma company Ruide Biological in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei Province, for $352 million in August 2017. The investment is aimed at improving blood supply in face of the China's increasing demand, the Xinhua News Agency reported previously.



