OPINION:
A dangerous biological pathogen — one that can cause disease in wheat, barley, maize and rice, wiping out crops and leading to vomiting, liver damage and birth defects if ingested — was smuggled into the U.S. by two Chinese nationals, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of Michigan announced Tuesday.
The fungus, called Fusarium graminearum, is defined in scientific literature as a “potential agroterrorism weapon” and is responsible for “billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year,” the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Yunqing Jian, a member of the Chinese Communist Party, received funding from the Chinese government to study the pathogen in China and allegedly intended to use her research fellow position at the University of Michigan to further it, knowing the pathogen’s imminent threat to public safety and that there were restrictions on the importation of the material.
“This case is a sobering reminder that the CCP is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply, which would have grave consequences … putting American lives and our economy at serious risk,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in a statement Tuesday.
The Chinese are waging a war against America on our own soil. In 2020, the FBI reported that about half its nearly 5,000 counterintelligence cases involved China. Ian Mitch, a senior policy researcher at Rand Corp., warned in Newsweek in April that China’s spy network “may be developing the skills to physically sabotage critical infrastructure [in the U.S.] during a conflict.”
In 2023, Politico reported that two Chinese were indicted on charges of operating an unlawful Chinese police station in Manhattan used to silence dissenters in the U.S. and that “security agencies across Europe and the Americas are investigating more than 100 facilities that an advocacy organization exposed in September as overseas outposts of China’s security apparatus.”
It has been well documented that China is purchasing American farmland, often near sensitive military sites. According to the Department of Agriculture, foreign investments in U.S. agricultural land grew to approximately 40 million acres in 2021, about as much as the entire state of Nebraska.
Still, Chinese infiltration in our higher institutions — stealing trade, intellectual property and other sensitive research — remains the most nefarious and is why Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced last week that the U.S. government would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.”
Roughly 277,000 students from China attended school in the United States last year, down from a high of around 370,000 in 2019. Reuters reported that Chinese nationals constitute approximately 25% of all international students in the U.S. and 16% of all graduate STEM students.
In May, the Stanford Review published an expose uncovering Chinese academic espionage at Stanford. The article said there are about “1,129 Chinese International students on campus, a select number are actively reporting to the Chinese Communist Party.” It detailed how a Chinese law enacted in 2017 mandates that all Chinese citizens support and cooperate with state intelligence work, regardless of location.
“One student who experienced espionage firsthand was too fearful to recount their story, even via encrypted messaging,” The Stanford Review reported. “‘The risk is too high,’ they explained. Transnational repression, $64 million in Chinese funding, and allegations of racial profiling have contributed to a pervasive culture of silence at Stanford and beyond.”
In 2022, the Biden administration ended the Justice Department’s China Initiative because of racial profiling concerns. President Trump created the initiative in 2018 to target Chinese trade secret theft at U.S. universities.
Law enforcement working those cases was aghast at Mr. Biden’s directive.
Michael German, a former FBI agent, told The New Yorker at the time, “The FBI will say, ‘If you look at our cases, people of Chinese origin are overrepresented,’ but that’s not measuring spies — it’s measuring who the F.B.I. is investigating.”
Christopher Johnson, a former CIA analyst with extensive experience in China, told The New Yorker that Chinese spying at U.S. universities was a legitimate, “worrying” concern and “to compare it to a McCarthyist virus — I don’t see it that way.”
When the China Initiative was launched in 2018, FBI Director Christopher A. Wray testified on the “naivete” of college administrators in admitting CCP agents.
“The use of nontraditional collectors, especially in the academic setting — whether it’s professors, scientists, students — we see in almost every field office that the FBI has around the country,” he said.
That same year, the National Institutes of Health warned U.S. universities that “threats to the integrity of U.S. biomedical research exist. NIH is aware that some foreign entities have mounted systematic programs to influence new researchers and peer reviewers. … This kind of inappropriate influence is not limited to biomedical research; it has been a significant issue for defense and energy research for some time.”
From 2018 to 2022, the FBI leveled multiple indictments at Chinese nationals on charges of spying or recruiting others to spy on behalf of China, all associated with U.S. colleges. Some of those indictments were dismissed and were exploited by the CCP to accuse the U.S. of racial discrimination, leading the Biden administration to abandon the China Initiative.
Trump 2.0 has no such concerns.
During a news briefing last week, the State Department said it would refuse to accept Beijing’s “exploitation” of American universities.
“We use every tool that we have to vet and to make sure we know who’s coming in,” said spokesperson Tammy Bruce. “In this particular case, the United States is putting America first by beginning to revoke visas of Chinese students as warranted.”
• Kelly Sadler is commentary editor and a columnist for The Washington Times.