OPINION:
In July 2024, a customs officer at Detroit Metropolitan Airport found four baggies filled with reddish plant material hidden in the backpack of Chinese national Zunyong Liu.
The substance was Fusarium graminearum, a crop fungus that attacks grains and produces toxins that sicken humans and livestock.
Prosecutors called it a “potential agroterrorism weapon.” Liu worked as a researcher at Zhejiang University, which holds classified government research credentials and which the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party found has conducted cybersecurity research funded by China’s Ministry of State Security.
Liu’s girlfriend, Yunqing Jian, worked in a University of Michigan lab. Both had received Chinese government funding to study the pathogen, and investigators uncovered evidence of Jian’s loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.
Unfortunately, the “Fusarium couple” was not an aberration.
Over months, prosecutors charged a string of Chinese researchers tied to that same university, including a Wuhan doctoral student who mailed four packages of roundworm material and three colleagues at the lab who refused to cooperate with an internal review and were stopped at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport attempting to flee to China.
This continual transit of pathogens and personnel must be understood not as an immediate vector for agroterrorism, but as a pipeline across the ocean. Under Beijing’s unrestricted warfare policy and civil-military fusion strategy, the line between academic research and military application is deliberately erased.
American university biosafety rules were built to prevent accidents, not to screen for adversaries arriving on research visas with foreign government grants. What stopped these illicit transfers was ultimately a handful of dedicated federal agents and customs officers.
While we take a reactive posture, the Chinese Communist Party has been strategically positioning itself within every layer of U.S. agriculture, not just in the lab. Start with ownership. Syngenta, the world’s largest crop protection company, is a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned conglomerate ChemChina, which sits on the Pentagon’s 1260H list of Chinese military companies.
The Department of Defense is barred from contracting with 1260H entities, yet Syngenta still sells seeds and chemicals to American farmers with no comparable restriction.
Smithfield Foods, which controls a large share of U.S. pork, is majority-owned by Hong Kong’s WH Group, an acquisition originally financed by a Chinese state-owned bank.
These are not passive investments. Chinese law dictates that they cannot be.
China’s National Intelligence Law obligates every Chinese company and citizen to support and cooperate with state intelligence work on demand, and its Data Security Law extends Beijing’s reach over the data that those firms hold. This includes the agronomic data that companies such as Syngenta collect across the American heartland.
CCP dominance of important facets of our crop input and protein supply chains could be weaponized in a war between the U.S. and China in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea.
Then there is the land. By the Department of Agriculture’s count, Chinese-linked entities control at least 277,000 acres of American farmland, including parcels near sensitive installations. In 2022, Fufeng Group — a Chinese firm with reported ties to the CCP — bought 370 acres about a dozen miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota.
In July 2025, the USDA published maps identifying Chinese-owned land near more than a dozen other military installations from Arizona to North Carolina.
Washington has begun to respond. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins’ 2025 National Farm Security Action Plan was the first serious effort to treat agriculture as a national security domain. The USDA has modernized the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act with a digitized reporting system and an online portal for farmers to report foreign ownership.
The farm bill that the House passed in April would expand the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States jurisdiction over agricultural land, biotechnology and businesses.
Still, it is not enough. The Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act still relies on self-reported filings and lacks meaningful penalties for those who file late or not at all, and the new farm bill declined to ban outright the ownership of farmland by foreign adversaries.
Effective fixes, though, are within reach. Congress should establish real criminal penalties for the reckless importation of dangerous agricultural pathogens, with sharply enhanced sentences when the offense is committed on behalf of a foreign government. It could enact and then rigorously enforce a CFIUS expansion that would bar foreign adversaries from acquiring land near military installations.
The research security conditions the USDA now attaches to its grants should be written into durable law so a future administration cannot quietly reverse them. Agricultural threat assessment should likewise be incorporated into research visa vetting.
Finally, the unrestricted U.S. market access of a company barred from Pentagon contracting, such as Syngenta, deserves a hard second look. American agriculture is not merely an industry; it is a strategic asset, one that our adversary has studied, mapped and begun to position against, parcel by parcel, lab by lab and company by company.
The Fusarium case did not reveal a fungal problem. It revealed how thin the line is between a vulnerable lab and a national crisis.
• Adam Savit is director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute and former senior adviser for national security to the secretary of agriculture.
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