As the saying goes: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” So what would one call it the fifth time it is discovered that someone affiliated with China deliberately violates the law to biologically threaten Americans?
The Justice Department recently announced that it has secured a guilty plea in the case of Youhuang Xiang, a Chinese citizen who was a postdoctoral researcher at Indiana University. Xiang attempted to smuggle “samples of DNA of E. coli bacteria” from China into the United States, admitting to mislabeling the package intentionally to ensure it would arrive. For this potential biological terrorism, Xiang has received a whopping sentence of at least four months in prison, a $500 fine, and one year of probation.
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If you feel like this story sounds familiar, it’s because the Justice Department in 2025 charged three other Chinese nationals affiliated with the University of Michigan with smuggling roundworms into the U.S., posing a threat to American agriculture. The announcement of charges in that case came one week before another Chinese citizen affiliated with the same university pleaded guilty to smuggling in a fungus that could devastate crop yields and poison people and livestock alike.
These three cases are not the only recent examples of Chinese criminality when it comes to biological agents on American soil. In 2023, officials in Reedley, California, discovered a secret, illegal biolab connected to a Chinese company that contained multiple infectious diseases. The company was also attempting to build a lab close to an international airport and Air National Guard base in Fresno.
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Then, earlier this year, another secret biolab tied to the same Chinese individual charged in the Reedley case was discovered in Las Vegas. Instead of an abandoned warehouse, this lab was operating in a home that was also being rented out to people through Airbnb. That marks at least five examples in the past few years of Chinese-linked biological activities on American soil that pose a significant risk to people’s health, to entire neighborhoods, or to U.S. agriculture. Or all three.
At some point, you would think this would be a major cause of alarm, and yet much of American politics whistles past this trend, thanks in part to Democrats who think scrutinizing Chinese purchases of American farmland, for example, is racist. That leaves the question moving forward: How many more times do Chinese nationals need to be caught trying to poison America from within before it becomes a real problem that must be dealt with?
