Combating China’s spies is the FBI’s top counterintelligence priority. With good reason. Chinese espionage and influence operations targeting America operate at a vast scale and with great diversity.
Halting Chinese espionage is fundamentally a federal responsibility, but there’s a lot that states can do to help. Under Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), Florida has made resisting Chinese spies and lies a high priority. In 2021, DeSantis signed into law new regulations that booted foreign espionage and influence organizations, such as China’s notorious Confucius Institutes, from Florida campuses. The emphasis on colleges is no accident because Beijing, for many years, has viewed higher education institutions across the West as ideal venues for stealing secrets and spreading propaganda.
DeSantis went further in 2023, signing a new law that restricts certain international academic partnerships, including blocking students from China, Cuba, Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, and North Korea from being employed as graduate assistants on academic research projects on Florida state campuses. This law was applauded by those concerned about foreign, especially Chinese, theft of American IP but was roundly condemned by left-wing activists who claimed that it legalizes “discrimination against people of Asian descent.”
The difficult truth is that Beijing’s intelligence services employ their nationals abroad, including graduate students, to steal secrets, especially IP, from our universities. There’s “ethnic profiling” here, but it’s done by China, not the FBI. Nevertheless, Zhengfei Guan, a professor at the University of Florida, the state’s flagship campus, filed suit to halt Florida’s new law, claiming it harmed his research by preventing him from hiring Chinese students and discriminating against Asian Americans. “This is not a place for me anymore,” Guan asserted last month, and he had the support of other UF faculty and students in his legal fight.
Now we know why DeSantis moved to enact new laws to restrict Chinese espionage on Florida campuses. It turns out that the Department of Justice has investigated and plans to indict Chinese nationals employed or studying at the University of Florida for running an illegal campus smuggling ring, which, for seven years, shipped dangerous drugs and toxins to China, against university and federal regulations.
One of the students involved in the smuggling ring is Nongnong “Leticia” Zheng, a senior marketing major in the business school, who happens to be president of UF’s Chinese Students and Scholars Association, a group that was actively involved in protests against DeSantis’s law blocking Chinese nationals from certain research positions. Last Friday, Zheng admitted that she had been informed by the Justice Department that she was the target of a grand jury investigation. She has been assigned a federal public defender. The next day, UF banned her from campus for three years.
The other Chinese students, listed as co-conspirators in prosecution documents, have not been named. The ringleader was Pen “Ben” Yu, a 51-year-old UF employee who worked in the stockroom of a university bioresearch lab. He pleaded guilty last week to diverting biochemical products to China with false documents and wire fraud. He faces up to 20 years in prison.
Their clandestine operation, which ran from mid-2016 to mid-2023, was audacious. This was a complex scheme that featured the theft of biomedical products from labs — fentanyl, morphine, MDMA, cocaine, ketamine, codeine, methamphetamine, amphetamine, acetylmorphine, and methadone — which Yu then shipped to China illegally. The ring employed “borrowed” email addresses to provide cover for their illicit activities. The thieves also smuggled purified, non-contagious proteins of the cholera toxin and pertussis toxin, which causes whooping cough, to China under illegal circumstances. Yu compensated those who assisted in the scheme with gift cards, trips, and even loans.
Zheng professes her innocence: “What I was doing was, like, just a little work, and I didn’t get paid that much.” However, the FBI investigation revealed her deep involvement in the smuggling operation. Who exactly Yu reported to in China has not been revealed. In intercepted communications, Yu referred to his superior only as his boss. It’s apparent that Yu was working for Chinese intelligence in some capacity, perhaps one of the research institutes of the People’s Liberation Army that’s charged with stealing Western research.
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Because Yu and two of his co-conspirators are cooperating with the government, a fuller picture of what happened here will eventually emerge. There’s a bigger problem because just three years ago, another UF professor of Chinese origin was indicted on charges of fraud and concealing his ties to Beijing.
The lesson: DeSantis was correct to block easy Chinese Communist access to Florida’s campuses and research secrets.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.