U.S. attorney said the guilty plea and sentencing marks a ’small but important measure against secret biological threats from China.’
A Chinese researcher has pleaded guilty to smuggling a dangerous fungus into the United States and lying about it.
Jian Yunqing, 33, made the guilty plea on Nov. 12 in Detroit, Michigan, five months after her arrest over allegations that she smuggled in Fusarium graminearum, a plant pathogen known to cause head blight in cereal crops such as wheat and barley, from China.
According to the Department of Agriculture, Fusarium head blight has been the worst plant disease seen since the stem rust epidemics of the 1950s, with close to $3 billion in losses to wheat and barley farmers between 1998 and 2000. Another outbreak in 2003 caused over $13 million in losses for wheat farmers in the Southeastern states including Maryland, North Carolina, and Virginia.
Jian was sentenced to time served and will be quickly deported after her sentencing.
The plea and sentencing came days after the Justice Department charged three more Chinese researchers connected with the same university—the University of Michigan—in the government’s ongoing probe into biological material smuggling from China. The total number of Chinese researchers tied to the school and involved in smuggling now stands at six.
“We must stop Chinese nationals who are smuggling potentially catastrophic biomaterials. We cannot allow these smugglers to work in the shadows at the University of Michigan,” U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon said in a statement. He said the development on Wednesday marks a “small but important measure against secret biological threats from China.”
Jian, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Michigan, had received money from a state-funded Chinese foundation to conduct postdoctoral research on the fungus. Her boyfriend and co-defendent, Liu Zunyong, studied the same pathogen at Zhejiang University in China, where Jian obtained her doctorate degree.
Jian took a fellowship position at the University of Michigan’s Molecular Plant-Microbe Interaction Laboratory in 2023.
In her phone, FBI agents found a signed document dated 2024, where Jian pledged loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party and vowed to “resolutely implement the party’s educational guidelines and policies,” prosecutors said.
Investigators found messages on WeChat, a China-based social media app, that suggested Jian had smuggled biological materials into the United States, according to prosecutors. A translation of a conversation from 2022, cited in the court filing, showed Jian and Liu discussing where to put some unidentified seeds, with Jian saying she stuffed the seeds in her Martin boots in a “very small” ziplock bag.
By Eva Fu
