Authorities arrested a University of Michigan scholar with ties to the Chinese Communist Party for her involvement in allegedly smuggling a biological pathogen into the United States that could be used as a terrorism weapon to devastate U.S. food crops, according to a federal filing unsealed Tuesday.
Prosecutors have charged the scholar, 33-year-old Yunqing Jian, and her boyfriend, 34-year-old Zunyong Liu, with conspiring to smuggle Fusarium graminearum, a crop-destroying fungus that produces toxins harmful to humans and livestock, into the United States. Investigators discovered evidence of Jian's membership in the CCP and say that she received funding from a CCP-backed foundation to conduct postdoctoral research on the pathogen, the Detroit News reported based on the filing.
Jian is expected to appear in court Tuesday afternoon. Liu has returned to China.
The arrest comes as the Trump administration has ramped up its efforts to counter CCP influence on American college campuses and beyond, tightening visa restrictions for Chinese researchers and cracking down on CCP-linked Confucius Institutes. On Friday, prosecutors unsealed a separate case against a Chinese national and former University of Michigan student who allegedly voted illegally in the 2024 election before fleeing the country to avoid prosecution, the News reported.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last week that the Trump administration will "aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields." The administration will also ramp up "scrutiny of all future visa applications from the People's Republic of China and Hong Kong," Rubio said.
Liu smuggled the pathogen into the United States at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport in July 2024 by hiding it in a wad of tissues, according to the court filing reviewed by the News. Liu lied on his tourist visa application and to border officers at the airport but later admitted to investigators that he had intentionally brought the pathogen so that he could conduct research on it at the laboratory where Jian worked, an FBI special agent wrote in the Tuesday filing.
Liu's phone contained an article titled "2018 Plant-Pathogen Warfare Under Changing Climate Conditions," which explicitly describes the pathogen Liu tried to smuggle as destructive to crops, the FBI agent wrote.
While searching Jian's phone, authorities found a form containing her pledge last year to support the CCP, as well as a conversation between Jian and another person in January 2024 that suggested she had previously smuggled biological materials into the United States.
"The alleged actions of these Chinese nationals—including a loyal member of the Chinese Communist Party—are of the gravest national security concerns," interim U.S. attorney Jerome Gorgon said in a statement. "These two aliens have been charged with smuggling a fungus that has been described as a 'potential agroterrorism weapon' into … the heartland of America, where they apparently intended to use a University of Michigan laboratory to further their scheme."