chinks tried to smuggle crop-killing, human-poisoning fungus into the U.S. in 2024---caught! It appears they succeeded at least once before

By Grand Rapids Anonymous
wednesday, june 4, 2025 at 10:07:00 a.m. edt

chinks tried to smuggle crop-killing, human-poisoning fungus into the U.S. in 2024---caught! It appears they succeeded at least once before

"(zh) the story begins in july 2024, when Zunyong Liu landed in detroit on a tourist visa, claiming he was visiting his girlfriend. cbp officers, not buying the innocent tourist act, searched his luggage and found four plastic baggies stuffed with reddish plant material, later confirmed to be laced with fusarium graminearum. Liu initially played dumb, insisting someone must have planted the stuff in his bag—a story that collapsed faster than china's commercial real estate bubble.

"after squirming under questioning, he admitted to hiding the samples in a wad of tissues to dodge cbp scrutiny, intending to deliver them to Yunjing Jian's lab at the university of michigan for 'research.

"but the plot thickens. electronic communications between Jian and Liu, uncovered by the fbi, suggest this wasn't a one-off. messages from 2022 show Jian discussing how to smuggle biological materials past cbp, even boasting about hiding samples in her shoes during a previous trip. in early 2024, she reportedly arranged for an associate in china to mail a book with a plastic bag of material hidden inside. and then there's the kicker: Jian's phone contained a signed pledge of loyalty to the chinese communist party (ccp), alongside evidence of funding from a chinese government-backed foundation for her research on—surprise, surprise—fusarium graminearum. Liu's phone wasn't clean either, harboring an article titled '2018 plant-pathogen warfare under changing climate conditions,' which explicitly flags the fungus as a crop-destroying threat.

"the fbi's counterintelligence division, not known for chasing shadows, labeled this a 'grave national security concern.' U.S. attorney Jerome Gorgon didn't mince words, calling the smuggling attempt a deliberate move to introduce a pathogen that could paralyze America's agricultural crop belts."

GRA: So what happened to the fungus that got in the U.S. in 2022?

--GRA