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Thebirth of Lulu and Nana, if it was what Chinese scientist He Jiankui says it was,opens a new scope of possible futures. Biotechnologies that rely on nucleases,among which CRISPR-Cas9 but also TALE and “Zinc Finger” nucleases, can cut inmany turfs. Being able to precisely edit DNA or RNA, the two fundamental blocksof life, changes our relationship to our bodies, care and health. Sucha change will happen in our minds before it is distributed by the State. Notthat public policy monks are against biomedical innovation: they often welcomeit as a means to battle long-term diseases which disproportionately saddlepublic finances. Yet few countries allow, let alone foster, human embryoresearch. Enabling babies to be born free of such disease doesn’t seem to be amajor political priority.Genomeediting is not an unidentified political object. Decades of GMO (GeneticallyModified Organism, colloquially describing plants who received additional genesthrough genomics) debate have structured the political fracture on this topic. GMOsfirst politicized genome engineering. The traditional breeding techniques, usedon both plants and animals, didn’t trigger such debate. Bananas and cattle,among others, underwent a transgenerational selection processes which ended upbeing far more productive for our species than for theirs (though they did seean exponential rise in absolute value of individuals in a very short time). Thebiopolitical technologies and infrastructures enabling us to intervene on geneshave existed for millennia. What is changing is the level and the scale of theintervention, from selection to precision, from plasmids to nucleases, fromcorn to sapiens. The technology of government used to manage the biosphere mustevolve along with the change.Chinese ambiguityNotall countries are equal on that matter. While Europeans have been wary suchtechnologies, China is on the move. It wasn’t always the case. But an importantsignal was given in 2013 when Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, gave a greenlight to GMOs while recalling in a speech his own experience of the 1960sfamine, which remains a powerful trauma in the RPC’s recent political history.It is said that China would keep in its strategic backup supplies twice thegrain kept by other nations (six month’s consumption instead of three). In2015, 3.7 million hectares of GMO crops (mostly cotton) were cultivated onChinese soil. GMO corn, sometimes imported from the US, remains a politicalissue. The Chinese institutional structure, which relies on a conception ofchecks and balances different from the Western world and doesn’t make much roomfor some forms of social dissent, allows for swifter action on mattersconsidered as strategic by the Party.Makinggenome editing a human affair might also be made easier by the social cultureshaped by previous policies. The now defunct One Child Policy has given theChinese State a strong foothold in its citizens’ intimacy. What is elsewhereknown as “planned parenthood” has become well-establish system designed toinvade procreative mechanisms. The scraping of the policy in 2016 didn’ttrigger a baby boom: the idea of the “qualitative child”, nurtured by her orhis family’s sacrifices to reach the highest educational, health andprofessional heights, dies hard. In this context, making sure that the futurechild will have the best possible variants of some targeted genes is justanother link in an already existing chain. George Church, a star geneticist,has started exploring which alleles could give an advantage to its bearer(among which CCR5 delta 32, the variant on which Lulu would be homozygote andtherefore immune to HIV-1, can be found).Ifother nations start implementing such technologies in their family planningstrategies, it will be hard for the remaining States not to jump in. Worse, howcould we justify not using those technique to parents bearing grave monogenicdiseases, while their children could and would be born healthy in othercountries?