Chinese fungus smuggling reveals broader espionage threat to US security

Many Americans were probably surprised when they learned that two Chinese citizens, Yunqing Jian and Zunyong Liu, had been charged with trying to smuggle a fungus described as a “potential agroterrorism weapon” into the U.S. But they shouldn’t have been.

When the Cold War with the Soviet Union ended, many in the U.S. convinced themselves that China wasn’t a threat – that Beijing was moving toward democracy, open markets and liberalism. Nonsense. In fact, China clearly aims to replace us as the world’s major economy and military power.

They trade with us on unfair terms and manipulate their currency, causing huge trade deficits for the U.S. They steal or force us to surrender technology, either surreptitiously or through coercive partnership agreements with American companies that are too focused on short-term profit.

Across the world, China undermines our diplomatic power through economic means, building infrastructure on apparently generous terms but with strings attached.

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It’s no secret that China spies on us. We surely spy on them too, but they have a huge advantage in their massive resident or visiting diaspora in the Western countries, for which we have no counterpart. 

There are currently around 280,000 Chinese students in the U.S., but fewer than 1,000 American students in China. Americans number around 100,000 in China, while China is the third-largest immigrant group in the U.S. at over 2.4 million.

China’s 2017 National Intelligence Law demands that “all organizations and citizens shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts.” China has a huge diaspora population in Western countries, from students to permanent residents, that it can target to bribe or bully into acts of espionage. Like the Cubans and Russians, they have also bribed Americans with no ethnic ties to their country to spy for them.

In March 2024, a Chinese illegal alien wandered onto a Marine Corps base at Twentynine Palms, California. He was caught, but he still scoped out the security at our biggest Marine base. The Wall Street Journal counted 100 such “innocent” incidents of Chinese, here legally and illegally, wandering onto or photographing sensitive U.S. government sites in recent years. 

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A hot war with China in the next decade is not an impossible scenario. They are preparing for it, while our military is lagging in recruitment, equipment and technology. If conflict does break out, we would have our hands full in the theater of conflict given China’s rapid expansion in naval and air power. To assist their kinetic effort in the field, what might China do inside the United States?

It would only take a tiny percentage of the Chinese here to cause serious damage. In addition to permanent residents, students and visitors, when last I saw numbers on this, there were over 25,000 Chinese nationals with criminal convictions that China refused to let us return to them.

Mugshot of Yunqing Jian (Salinac County Sheriff)

In Fiscal Year 2024, 78,701 Chinese nationals entered the U.S. illegally at or between ports of entry. So far this fiscal year, more than 22,000 Chinese nationals have entered illegally.

In March 2024, I watched DHS-chartered buses dropping off aliens at a San Diego bus stop. Though I saw GPS tracking anklets worn by Eastern Europeans and Central Asians, I saw none on the Chinese. Unless they are caught committing a crime in the meantime, nearly all of them will roam free until their immigration cases are concluded, many years into the future.

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With potential assets nationwide, China could target our critical infrastructure, including water, electricity and the internet. They could also deploy engineered pathogens against humans that might wreak worse damage than COVID-19, which we now accept most likely “escaped” from a Chinese laboratory that was funded and controlled by their military and government.

Furthermore, they could attempt to destroy crops across our agricultural heartland, using a bioweapon like the fungus Jian and Liu were carrying, which causes “head blight,” a disease of cereal crops.

We need to take this threat seriously. For a generation, vetting of Chinese students, businesses, products, cultural exchanges and every other interaction with the United States has been too lax and overly trusting.

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Chinese were the top foreign buyers of U.S. commercial real estate in 2020, and in 2021, Chinese owners held 384,000 acres in the U.S. They often use shell companies to obscure the owner’s Chinese origin. Chinese individuals and entities have also purchased or attempted to buy land close to U.S. military installations in several states.

Yet the Biden administration dialed down or canceled Justice Department efforts “aimed at protecting American technology from China,” Reuters reported in 2021. At the same time, the Biden administration “drastically simplified the vetting process for Chinese illegal immigrants,” according to a hearing before the House Homeland Security Committee in 2024.

During the Cold War, we never let Russia buy up massive tracts of land, control vital industries and dominate raw material supply chains, nor gave its citizens open access to our schools and markets. Why do we let China?

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Customs and Border Protection inspectors did fine work catching the hidden fungus-needle in a haystack. We need a capable, motivated and fully funded Department of Homeland Security. And over at the State Department, while there is certainly room for cuts and re-organization, Secretary Marco Rubio would be wise to retain the experienced experts who work to limit Chinese access to our sensitive technology, protect American intellectual property, and properly vet their visiting students and researchers.

It’s past time to address this threat.

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