Yet ANOTHER Chinese Graduate Student Caught Smuggling Biological Agents Into US

“Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

Actually, by the second time, a “graduate student” from China was caught smuggling biological agents into the United States, it was clear that the Chinese were up to no good. Now that we have three incidents within a year it’s obvious that China has a program to disrupt the American agricultural industry as part of a “gray zone” warfare effort. 

This is the THIRD TIME THIS YEAR where a CCP “graduate student” has been caught smuggling biological weapons into the United States.

The risk of another Wuhan flu style incident (trillions of dollars of damage, hundreds of thousands dead), is too great.

END CCP STUDENT VISAS. https://t.co/xj7QfVihl0

— joshua steinman (🇺🇸,🇺🇸) (@JoshuaSteinman) December 19, 2025

Youhuang Xiang, a post-doctoral researcher and J-1 visa holder from China was charged with smuggling Escherichia coli (E. coli) into the U.S. and making false statements about it. 

This is yet another example of a researcher from China – given the privilege to work at a U.S. university – who then allegedly chose to take part in a scheme to circumvent U.S. laws and receive biological materials hidden in a package originating from China. 

The @FBI and our CBP partners are committed to enforcing U.S. laws put in place to protect against this global threat to our economy and food supply. If not properly controlled, E. coli and other biological materials could inflict devastating disease to U.S. crops and cause significant financial loss to the U.S. economy.

The FBI will not tolerate any attempt to exploit our nation’s institutions for illegal activity – as we have seen in this case and the three Chinese nationals charged in Michigan in November for allegedly smuggling biological materials into the U.S. on several occasions. The FBI and our partners are committed to defending the homeland and stopping any illegal smuggling into our country.

To all universities and their compliance departments: Please be vigilant of this trend. Ensure your researchers know that there is a correct and legal way to obtain a license to import/export approved biological materials, and it must be followed without exception. Our continued partnerships will help to better secure our nation and ensure all parties are held accountable.  

Over one million packages a day are shipped from Chinese retailers to customers in the United States through the postal system. Obviously, we have no idea how many of these might contain dangerous substances. There are over a quarter million Chinese students studying in the United States in any given year, and we have no idea how many of them are Chinese spies. 

We do know that many are coerced by the Chinese Communist Party to be spies, though, and that China has police stations to monitor their citizens while they are here. 

You can make all the economic arguments you like about how the Chinese students bring money and prop up our institutions of higher education—Trump did when he decided to keep the floodgates open to Chinese students—but valuing short-term economic gain while ignoring longer-term security vulnerabilities is foolhardy. 

It’s also how we have gotten into so many fiscal messes. Buy now, pay later. 

A biological agent attack on the US agricultural sector would wipe out any of the benefits we get from buying products from Temu, and importing spies from China to prop up our already corrupt higher education system has been eroding our competitive advantages and putting our country at risk. 

I enjoy having lower-cost products as much as the next guy, and have bought countless goods from China through Amazon (not Temu) that get shipped straight from the Far East to my door, but isn’t it time to reconsider the open-door policies that are putting our entire country at risk?

Think of how much disruption was caused by the egg shortage. Now extrapolate from that to wheat, corn, soybeans, and all the rest of our agricultural products. 

But our brilliant leaders in Washington don’t want to face the backlash that would come from revamping the system that brings us cheap products and extraordinary convenience, and frankly, I can understand that. You have to make the case over a long time when asking people to make sacrifices, which nobody is doing right now, and you have to be willing to take the political hit when the pain strikes.

Look at how feckless our elite were when COVID hit. Everybody in power KNEW it came from a Chinese lab, and almost everybody in that class decided to lie about it because the alternative was afraid of the political backlash and the fact that the applecart would be upset. 

Better to lie and look away. 

America will be hit with a biological attack, our leadership will likely know or suspect that it came from China, and chances are they will cover it up. 

We have the opposite of deterrence right now.