F​​ew cases better show how U.S.-China relations have deteriorated in the age of Big Data than the response Wang Jian 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.