China is stealing the farm. Real-time. Live action. Happening now.
The most devastating raid of agricultural technology in U.S. history has been underway for at least 25 years and continues at a blistering pace.
Case after case, year after year, brazen Chinese Communist Party (CCP) espionage continues. Yet, every federal prosecution highlights an undeniable truth—each bust is a pebble in a landslide of successful heists. Two new cases per day and 2,000 pending investigations, according to the FBI, many of those ag-related, all while CCP officials brazenly proclaim a theft policy of “picking flowers in foreign lands to make honey in China.”
Whether pinching product from research labs, digging rows in the heartland, masquerading as USDA-approved envoys, hiding seeds in carry-on luggage, mailing crop pathogens in panties, plane-hopping with trade secrets, or a litany of other heists, there’s always something new for the CCP to steal.
The ransacking of U.S. agriculture is on. Arguably, bigger and bolder than ever.
Adios From Wuhan
From 2014-2016, Jiunn-Ren Chen, a Chinese national, split time between Ankeny, Iowa, and St. Louis, Missouri, working under the Monsanto umbrella at The Climate Corporation (TCC). Good job and good life for a family man with a wife and daughter. More like good cover.
In late 2015, Chen contacted Sinochem China National Seed Corporation and requested employment. Sinochem, steered by the CCP, reciprocated. In May 2016, Chen flew to Beijing, met with Sinochem reps, and caught a flight back to the U.S. On June 1, he resigned from Monsanto/TCC, but kept hush-hush on the new job with Sinochem, insisting he was moving to China to be closer to extended family.
Later in the same day, June 1, Chen logged into TCC’s Google Drive account and downloaded six files. The following day, he downloaded two additional files. Further, between June 4-10, he downloaded 55 more files.
According to subsequent FBI testimony: The files downloaded by Chen after his resignation contained trade secrets and confidential proprietary information … Further analysis revealed that Chen had used his TCC email address to transmit confidential trade secrets and proprietary information to other email accounts on at least five occasions between approximately August 19, 2014 and February 14, 2015.
On August 19, 2016, Chen bought three one-way airline tickets to China. The next day, he, along with his wife and daughter, boarded an 11:30 a.m. flight out of St. Louis Lambert International Airport, 63 files the richer. Adios.
By way of Shanghai, Chen disappeared in Wuhan. He was never caught. He was never criminally prosecuted.
Chen’s story is dime-a-dozen. In 2022, then FBI Director Christopher Wray described the level of CCP theft as “More brazen, more damaging than ever before.”
“When we tally up what we see in our investigations, over 2,000 of which are focused on the Chinese government trying to steal our information and technology, there is just no country that presents a broader threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China … The Chinese government steals staggering volumes of information and causes deep, job-destroying damage across a wide range of industries, so much so that … we’re constantly opening new cases to counter their intelligence operations, about every 12 hours or so.”
“That theft, those threats,” Wray added, “are happening right here in America, literally every day.”
Col. (Ret.) John Mills, national security professional and former Director of Cybersecurity Policy, Strategy, and International Affairs at the Department of Defense, told Agweb in 2021: “The FBI woke up to this threat far too late, and now we are in very deep. It is the CCP’s goal to steal, glean, obtain, transcribe, and photograph anything of value from the U.S., and the agriculture sector is right at the top.”
Best Western Comforts
Multiple Chinese thieves and spies nabbed over the past decade offer a tiny glimpse behind the CCP’s espionage curtain and suggest ag theft on a vast scale.
• 2011: Mo Hailong, director of international business for Dabeinong Technology Group and a legal U.S. resident for 10 years, was spotted crawling through Iowa corn rows, pocketing biotech seed. The incident spurred a multi-year FBI investigation. Hailong and several CCP cohorts were arrested in 2013, boarding a plane for China. Hidden inside their luggage, under microwave popcorn bags and Subway napkins, were hundreds of seed samples. No matter: Hailong had already mailed over 1,000 lb. of seed corn (Pioneer and Monsanto) to Beijing. He was sentenced to 36 months in prison.
• 2013: Weiqiang Zhang obtained a doctorate in rice genetics at LSU and got a job at Ventria, a Kansas-based biopharmaceutical corporation, as a seed breeder, where he stole seed samples representing $75 million in research. Zhang used USDA letterhead to send counterfeit invitations to six colleagues in China, welcoming them on a tour of Ventria and several more ag stops. The delegates made the rounds (including Dale Bumpers National Rice Research Center in Stuttgart, Ark., where Zhang’s main accomplice, Wengui Yan, worked as a geneticist) and were nailed just before flying home with hundreds of rice seeds in their bags, hidden inside envelopes slipped inside a Best Western remote control pouch and within the folds of an Arkansas Democrat Gazette newspaper. Zhang was sentenced to almost 10 years and Yan to one year.
• 2017: Haitao Xiang worked for The Climate Corporation (Monsanto) estimating soil properties via satellite imagery. On May 24, 2017, Xiang announced his forthcoming resignation, and roughly two weeks later, on June 9, after completing an exit interview, downloaded a proprietary algorithm, the Nutrient Optimizer, onto an SD card, and drove from St. Louis to Chicago O’Hare. Xiang was caught at boarding with the SD card in a carry-on bag. He was allowed to leave for China; the FBI wasn’t certain, at that point, what was on the card. After a return to the U.S., in 2019, Xiang was arrested. Despite seizure of the SD card, Xiang presumably had stashed other copies of the Nutrient Optimizer, and possibly delivered those to CCP contacts. He was sentenced in 2022 to 29 months.
However, outright ag technology theft is only one facet of the CCP’s duplicity. Next up, agroterrorism.
Lie and Deny
In July 2024, Zunyong Liu, a plant pathology scientist from Zhejiang University, flew into Detroit from Shanghai on a tourist visa. He claimed to be on a vacation to visit his girlfriend, Yunqing Jian, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor. (UM maintains roughly 4,000 Chinese students, roughly half the university’s foreign population.) Both halves of the loved-up couple had expertise with a nasty biological pathogen, Fusarium graminearum, a strain that causes head blight and annually inflicts billions of dollars in crop losses. Both had contributed to major academic papers on Fusarium.
U.S. Customs officers gave Liu the squeeze—and out spilled a chain of lies and half-truths. He claimed to have no “work materials” with him, but inside a small pocket of Liu’s backpack, officers found crumpled tissues concealing a filter paper with a “series of circles drawn on it” and four plastic bags containing red plant fibers.
Liu doubled down, insisting on a setup, and claimed the material was planted in his carry-on. As investigators tightened the screws, Liu folded, admitting he was transporting Fusarium for research at UM.
While searching Liu’s iPhone, Customs agents found a pdf in a WhatsApp folder: 2018 Plant-Pathogen Warfare under Changing Climate Conditions. The article referenced Fusarium as a destructive disease and pathogen for agriculture.
When FBI agents questioned Liu’s girlfriend, Jian, she denied all knowledge of Liu’s smuggling or intentions. She lied—repeatedly. As agents asked for her smartphone, Jian began “manipulating” the device as it was seized. The phone contained multiple communications with Liu (deported back to China) that had been wiped clean, but the remaining messages were damning and showed direct involvement in Liu’s illegal activity.
Additionally, her phone contained a telltale work assessment form from January 2024 that included a pledge of loyalty to the CCP: I adhere to the four basic principles, support the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CCP), resolutely implement the party’s educational guidelines and policies, love education, care for students, unite colleagues, love the motherland, and care about national affairs…
Adding deep layers to the cake, Jian had personally smuggled biological pathogens into the U.S. on prior occasions, and had given another Chinese national, Xia Chen, explicit instructions in how to conceal and code pathogens in postal mail: “There are usually no problems. Rest assured. I have mailed these before.”
Pleasures and Pathogens
Days after the arrest of Yunqing Jian (sentenced to time served in November 2025 and deported to China), another Chinese national, Chengxuan Han, a scientist at a laboratory in Wuhan, was nabbed by U.S. Customs agents on June 8, 2025, at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after a flight from Shanghai. Han was traveling on a J1 work visa to do research at the University of Michigan, specifically at the lab of Professor Shawn Xu of the Life Sciences Institute.
Why was she apprehended? Han mailed four packages, which she labeled as “plastic plates,” but which contained plasmids and petri dishes of C. elegans with genetic modifications (a nematode prohibited from import by USDA) from her Wuhan lab to the UM lab. The packages were intercepted by U.S. Customs. Inside one package was a book with a peculiar envelope slipped between the pages. The envelope held a handwritten note with 28 shapes and a “labeling scheme” for each shape. The note stated: “Hello! This is a fun letter with interesting patterns. I hope you can enjoy the pleasure within it.”
From the get-go, Han denied mailing any packages. Pressed by investigators, she then admitted mailing packages, but insisted the contents only included paper cups and a book. Later, Han acknowledged the biological material, but insisted it was part of a sequencing game she devised with clues given for each plasmid “for fun.”
Confronted with more evidence, Han fessed up, according to an affidavit submitted by FBI agent Edward Nieh: “Han admitted that she had sent packages containing nematode growth medium (NGM), in the petri dishes, and plasmids, in the envelope. Based on my training and experience, it is unlikely that the petri dishes contained solely NGM because NGM is readily available and inexpensive in the United States. CBP Officers conducted a manual review of Han’s electronic devices and found Han had deleted the content of her devices three days prior to her arrival to the United States.”
Han was sentenced to time served, roughly three months, and deported back to China—free to mail more pathogens to the U.S.
Scot-Free: Have A Nice Flight
Who, specifically, were the intended recipients of Han’s “fun” packages at the University of Michigan?
Enter three Chinese citizens, all research scholars holding J-1 visas at the Shawn Xu laboratory: Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang. As soon as authorities made the connections, the threesome bailed.
On September 29, 2025, the trio was terminated by UM after refusing to participate in an internal investigation. Three weeks later, the men were arrested at JFK International Airport at the departure gate for a flight to Beijing.
Bottom line, despite the arrests, all three got away scot-free. In February 2026, DOJ dropped the case against Bai, F. Zhang, and Z. Zhang. Smuggling charges were dismissed at DOJ’s request. The three researchers flew home to China. “The dismissal came as a pleasant surprise,” stated John Minock, their attorney. “We don’t know the details. What we were told was there was some kind of intervention by the Chinese consulate in Chicago.”
Underwear of Man-Made Fibers
Generally, panties laced with E. coli, mailed 8,000 miles to a CCP plant pathology researcher in Indiana by a technology company in China, tend to draw U.S. Customs attention.
In June 2023, Youhuang Xiang, a card-carrying member of the Chinese Communist Party with a doctorate in plant physiology, received a J1 visa to study genome editing in wheat plants and resistance to fungal diseases at the Department of Biology at Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington. Among his specialties: Fusarium graminearum.
On March 28, 2024, Xiang received a package from China. Per shipping documents, the package was listed as “Underwear of Man-Made Fibers, Other Womens,” and shipped by Guangzhou Sci Tech Innovation Trading.
Tracked and questioned by U.S. Customs and the FBI, Xiang played innocent. Denial and more denial: I never worked for the CCP and if any of the labs I worked at in China were funded by the CCP, I don’t know anything about it.
The package, he initially declared, was merely a jacket. However, Xiang later admitted the “clothing” contained plasmid DNA derived from E. coli bacteria and was mailed to him for use in his research at IU. He pleaded guilty to smuggling E. coli and was sentenced to time served (four months) and deported.
And the band played on.
Midnight In Michigan
The funnel is in place. In a typical year, 250,000-300,000 Chinese students (roughly one-third of all foreign enrollees) attend U.S. universities, with almost all in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields and all vetted by the CCP. “Every Chinese student who China sends here has to go through a party and government approval process,” a senior U.S. official told Reuters in 2018. “You may not be here for espionage purposes as traditionally defined, but no Chinese student who’s coming here is untethered from the state.”
A 2019 FBI report states “the vast majority of students and researchers from China are in the United States for legitimate academic reasons.” However, the FBI’s determination is damning, considering the “vast majority” potentially leaves tens of thousands in the active espionage category.
The FBI report also asserts: “the Chinese government uses some Chinese students … and professors to operate as non-traditional collectors of intellectual property.”
“These Chinese scholars,” the analysis notes, “may serve as collectors, wittingly or unwittingly, of economic, scientific, and technological intelligence from U.S. institutions to ultimately benefit Chinese academic institutions and businesses.”
A cursory look at Chinese researcher/student espionage activity beyond agriculture, just over the past few years, is striking.
• In 2020, two Chinese University of Michigan master’s students, Jielun Zhang and Yuhao Wang, were apprehended while photographing military infrastructure at Naval Air Station Key West (NASKW), in Florida. Zhang was sentenced to a year in prison; Wang got nine months. Also, days prior to Zhang and Wang’s arrest, another Chinese national, Lyuyou Liao, was arrested at NASKW for entering and taking pictures, and sentenced to one year. (Significantly, another Chinese university student, Zhao Qianli, while on a summer exchange program in 2018, was caught photographing and videotaping at NASKW. He was sentenced to a year. His host university in the U.S. was not publicly disclosed.)
• Saw-Teong Ang, a University of Arkansas engineering professor, was indicted in 2020 for wire fraud after accepting U.S contracting funds related to NASA and the Air Force while making false statements and not disclosing CCP ties. Ang got a year in prison.
• Zhengdong Cheng, a professor at Texas A&M, was charged in 2020 with wire fraud for hiding relationships with Chinese corporations and universities, while accepting a NASA grant. Cheng was sentenced to time served after 13-month prison stint.
• Song Guo Zheng, a professor of internal medicine at Ohio State University and Pennsylvania State University, was sentenced to three years in an immunology fraud. After hiding affiliation with a CCP-influenced university, Zheng attempted to flee the U.S. in 2020, according to DOJ: “He was carrying three large bags, one small suitcase and a briefcase containing two laptops, three cell phones, several USB drives, several silver bars, expired Chinese passports for his family, deeds for property in China and other items.”
• After Texas A&M University began questioning CCP influence at its lab facilities, and attempted to find out how many faculty members were involved with Chinese recruitment, the answer was stunning. From the Wall Street Journal, Jan. 30, 2020: “… they were astounded at the results—more than 100 were involved with a Chinese talent-recruitment program, even though only five had disclosed their participation.”
• Former University of Florida professor Lin Yang was indicted in 2021 for making false statements in 2019 regarding a $1.75 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “Our indictment alleges that Yang engaged in acts of deliberate deception so that he could also further the research goals of the Chinese Communist government and advance his own business interests,” said U.S. Attorney Lawrence Keefe. Yang fled the U.S. in 2019, prior to the indictment, and has not returned.
• In August 2023, five Chinese University of Michigan students (Zhekai Xu, Renxiang Guan, Haoming Zhu, Jingzhe Tao, and Yi Liang) were caught at midnight photographing military vehicles and facilities at Camp Grayling, a Michigan National Guard site. They graduated and left the U.S. before charges were filed in October 2024.
• In April 2026, Tianrui Liang, a Chinese university student visiting the U.S., was charged with photographing military aircraft at Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, Neb. Liang said the pictures were for his “personal collection.” According to the FBI, Liang also drove to Ellsworth Air Force Base in South Dakota prior to his Nebraska stop. Liang is currently in federal custody.
And the kicker for U.S. agriculture? The number of CCP-approved Chinese students in U.S. colleges, according to the White House, is set to climb to 600,000 per year. Simple math: If the CCP taps a mere 1% for espionage and theft, that means 6,000 spies/moles on American campuses. Every percent higher means an exponential leap in technology thieves.
Coerce, Coopt, Compel
China openly flaunts its policy of theft. The CCP, in 2017, announced it would force all citizens and companies to steal trade secrets via a national intelligence law: “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with state intelligence work” if directed. The blanket law includes students or researchers. Coerce, coopt, and compel.
The CCP has executed the most expansive technology heist in history, tapping all fields of U.S. industry, business, and production, including agriculture, as evidenced by a 2017 report by the U.S. Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimating a loss of $255 billion to $600 billion to the U.S. economy each year, and fingering China as the “principle IP infringer.”
In 2019, Joe Augustyn, a 28-year veteran of the CIA, stated, “We know without a doubt that anytime a graduate student from China comes to the US, they are briefed when they go, and briefed when they come back.”
“They don’t just come here to spy ... they come here to study and a lot of it is legitimate,” Augustyn said. “But there is no question in my mind, depending on where they are and what they are doing, that they have a role to play for their government.”
Previously cited national security expert John Mills, echoes Augustyn. “It’s my opinion that many are either working for the Ministry of State Security (China’s CIA-FBI hybrid organization), and 100% are fully aware of their obligation to the CCP … Part of their presence here, granted with CCP permission, is a promise, often a quid pro quo, to assist the CCP in getting whatever is needed.”
“I’d say most all U.S. industries have been asleep, certainly including agriculture,” Mills adds. “The CCP gave us a blueprint and announced they were going to take over certain high-tech industries, and agriculture was right there on the list. They literally told the world what they were going to do. If a gang of thieves tells you they are going to steal your farm, you should believe them.”
Seed, digital tech, or machinery, the CCP has jammed fat fingers deep in the American ag pie. They play for keeps.
For more from Chris Bennett (@ChrisBennettMS or cbennett@farmjournal.com or 662-592-1106), see:
Corn and Cocaine: Roger Reaves and the Most Incredible Farm Story Never Told
How the Deep State Tried, and Failed, to Crush an American Farmer
Game of Horns: Iowa Poacher’s Antler Addiction Leads to Historic Bust
Ghost Cattle: $650M Ponzi Rocks Livestock Industry, Money Still Missing
Georgia Watermelon Heist Explodes into Epic Night of Pandemonium
Sisters of Farm Fraud: How 4 Siblings Fleeced USDA for $10M
When Conservation Backfires: Landowner Defeats Feds in Mindboggling Private Property Case
Cold-Busted: Frozen Deer Decoy Nabs Poachers and Cocaine in Spectacular Sting
Sticky Fingers: USDA Fraudster Steals $200M in Stunning Scam
