On Monday, December 1st, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed that a Chinese scholar admitted to smuggling dangerous pathogens into Michigan, and at present, this Chinese citizen has been deported.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, 33-year-old Yunqing Jian from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was sentenced on November 12th to time served and is awaiting the final judgment in a federal case.
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino posted a series of recent FBI cases on the social media platform X on Monday, including mentioning Yunqing Jian’s case:
“Chinese citizen Yunqing Jian admitted to smuggling dangerous biological pathogens into the country and lying to FBI agents. She has now been deported. The FBI will not stand idly by and let foreign hostile forces exploit our top-tier university facilities for their nefarious purposes,” Bongino wrote.
Yunqing Jian was accused of conspiring with her boyfriend, Zunyong Liu, who works at Zhejiang University in China, to smuggle a plant pathogenic fungus called Fusarium graminearum into the United States. This pathogen can cause “head blight” in wheat, barley, corn, and rice. This disease affects barley, rice, wheat, and corn, resulting in billions of dollars in economic losses annually.
Liu has returned to China, and U.S. authorities stated that he is unlikely to re-enter the United States.
Another suspect, 28-year-old Chengxuan Han, a doctoral student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology, was arrested in June on three counts of smuggling charges and making false statements to U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials. Han pleaded not guilty. In September, he was sentenced to time served and deported back to China.
Last month, federal investigators charged three other Chinese citizens with conspiring to smuggle goods into the U.S. and making false statements. Court records show that these three individuals entered the U.S. with J-1 visas as scholars at the University of Michigan and resided in Ann Arbor.
Bongino also mentioned another case involving a Chinese-American in his post on X. He wrote, “Chenguang Gong, a dual Chinese-American citizen, was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison for stealing highly sensitive commercial secrets from a research and development company in the Los Angeles area where he worked. These secrets included thousands of documents and blueprints related to U.S. government technologies for detecting nuclear missile launches, tracking ballistic missiles and hypersonic missiles, and developing cutting-edge technology to evade infrared-guided missiles. This case aims to warn that anyone attempting to undermine U.S. national security will face severe punishment.”
Chenguang Gong, 59, originally from China, naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2011.
According to the indictment, Gong used to reside in San Jose and had a temporary residence in Thousand Oaks, Southern California. The Department of Justice pointed out that from approximately 2014 to 2022, while employed by several large tech companies in the U.S., Gong submitted numerous applications to China’s government-managed “talent programs”. In a 2019 email, he mentioned that he took the risk of participating in the “talent plan” in China, believing he could contribute to China’s “high-end military integrated circuits”.