I personally know the American scientist involved (not mentioned in this article), and I'm kinda shocked right now.
If you know the person involved, do you also know the reason why China decided to make gene edited babies? What is their point? Does this have anything to do with their plans of starting an all out war if things didn't go their way? Is this why they suddenly employed High School graduates to manufacture AI killer weapons for them? Do they plan to use these gene edited babies as super soldiers? There's so many questions!
I doubt that the Chinese government (i.e. China itself) has had much to do with it until a few days ago, when this story broke. I'm not sure what are laws are on human gene editing in China, but the Chinese government's response to this will be fairly telling. There's an arms race of sorts to gain an advantage in CRISPR, and it's going to be a huge market when the technology is improved enough to meet regulatory measures. China would love it if a Chinese company could corner that market. So maybe the researchers involved in this felt like they took a calculated risk with pushback from the scientific community and legal consequences, but even if their CRISPR'ing was perfect, the necessity of this particular genetic editing sounds questionable, at best. On the one hand, I'd love to hasten progress on CRISPR. It's a game changer for humans if we can learn to harness it. In the future, we might even criminalize not editing an individual's genome identified as possessing bad mutations (cancer, retardation, multiple sclerosis, etc.). People might opt for in vitro fertilization almost all of the time. There might be laws against editing humans to be smarter, stronger, or other enhancements, though. It'll be an interesting legal minefield.
That is the crux of it. If it was like "yeah we found out that the embryo does indeed have HIV and tried to fix it", that's different than attempting to encode a specific mutation that has both desirable and undesirable traits to fix a problem that wasn't likely to occur in the first place. Parental consent be damned, sometimes I don't even think people should be allowed to play the lottery.