Persecution of Chinese scientists is part of anti-China policy that could lead to World War III
On March 20, Danhao Wang, a brilliant thirty-year-old Chinese post-doctoral physicist at the University of Michigan, allegedly took his own life after being subjected to hostile questioning by federal agents.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs afterwards demanded a full U.S. investigation and called for an end to what it described as “discriminatory law enforcement targeting Chinese students and scholars.”[1]
CodePink, the anti-war social justice organization, hosted a vigil in Danhao’s honor and presented a petition to the University of Michigan’s Board of Regents calling for increased protection of international students.
The World Socialist Web Site wrote that Wang’s death was “the direct consequence of a systematic government- and university-sponsored political operation targeting young Chinese researchers. This xenophobic purge, deeply intertwined with the capitalist military-industrial complex, is part of the broader attack on the democratic rights of all immigrants, students and working people.”
Author or co-author of more than 100 scientific articles including one in the prestigious journal Nature, Wang’s work was helping to map a blueprint for a new generation of transistors capable of outperforming the existing radar technologies currently used by the U.S. and other militaries.
Additionally, Wang, who held a Ph.D. from China’s University of Science and Technology, provided the potential physical substrate for “edge AI” computing that would enable AI processing to occur on disconnected devices, such as autonomous combat drones, missile interceptors, or isolated battlefield sensors, without requiring connectivity to cloud networks.
A 2023 U.S. House report had warned that partnerships between U.S. and Chinese universities have allowed hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding to aid Beijing in developing critical technologies that could be used for military purposes.
Kurt Campbell, the Deputy Secretary of State during the Biden administration, told a Council on Foreign Relations forum in 2024 that he would welcome more Chinese students studying humanities and social sciences but “not particle physics” in American schools.
According to journalist Chris John, Wang’s breakthrough work in “the most contested terrain in the global competition for technological supremacy” is what invited federal scrutiny on him.
The U.S. government especially fears that China’s growing advantage in semi-conductor technology will allow the Chinese to supersede the U.S. in air defense, radar systems and high frequency warfare capabilities.[2]
John noted that “China’s raw materials dominance and accelerating domestic semiconductor R&D is precisely what has driven Washington’s escalating scrutiny of Chinese researchers working on advanced materials at American universities.”
The Trump administration has combined the scrutiny with an escalating campaign of export controls and counterintelligence activity in an attempt to prevent China from developing the world’s most advanced semiconductor industry.
Besides Danhao Wang, the World Socialist Web Site identified six other Chinese scientists who have been subjected to persecution in the last year: Yunqing Jian, Chengxuan Han, Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang and Zhiyong Zhang, all affiliated with the University of Michigan, alongside Youhuang Xiang of Indiana University.
All six had their American careers ruined by the criminalization of routine biological research that was falsely labeled as agro-terrorism or espionage by the Department of Justice.
Former Attorney General Pam Bondi said in a statement following the arrest of Xu Bai, Fengfan Zhang, and Zhiyong Zhang that “attempting to smuggle biological materials under the guise of ‘research’ is a serious crime that threatens America’s national and agricultural security. We will remain vigilant to threats like these from foreign nationals who would take advantage of America’s generosity to advance a malicious agenda.”[3]
The materials the three scientists were accused of smuggling, however, were tiny transparent worms that are harmless laboratory organisms.
Their attorney, Raymond Cassar, said the package was mislabeled to avoid inspection delays at the border as the worms had a limited lifespan.
According to Cassar, “there was no intention of doing anything nefarious. The worms have been consistently used for studying chemical reactions, light sensitivity.”
Validating Cassar’s assessment, the charges were dropped in February 2026, though the three scientists were put into Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody and deported.
The University of Michigan had terminated their employment and revoked their visa sponsorships after their arrests—as they did in the case of Yunqing Jian, who endured five months of incarceration and was permanently barred from the U.S. after being accused in June 2025 of conspiring with her boyfriend, Zungyong Liu, to sabotage the American food supply by failing to register a strain of Fusarium graminearum that she tried to bring into the U.S. with the Department of Agriculture.
Michigan Congressman John Moolenaar (R), chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) who was recently appointed to the Board of Directors of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), issued a statement claiming that Jian and Liu’s arrests highlighted the “Chinese Communist Party’s threat to our food supply and our universities.”
University of Wisconsin plant pathologist Caitilyn Allen, told Chemistry World, however, that F. graminearum is not classified as an agroterrorism weapon and does not pose a national security threat. Allen further said that it appears that Jian and Liu were “planning to do experiments with it in a university lab that studies how plants resist diseases with the goal of breeding disease-resistant crops that don’t require fungicides. Resistant plants are the best way to manage crop diseases. It seems that this was bad judgment fueled by scientific excitement [in failing to obtain the necessary permit from the U.S. Department of Agriculture], not agroterrorism.”
Jan Leach, a plant pathologist at Colorado State University, stated that Jian and Liu may not have been aware that they required a Department of Agriculture permit and suggested that better training for students may be needed.
Bob McMurray, a CodePink activist at the University of Michigan, told The Michigan Daily that “the university should [indeed] have a structure and a system of making sure that these researchers know that they need to cross all their t’s and dot all their i’s. It should be part of the University’s responsibility to say, ‘You’re coming into this environment, and we want to protect you, we want to keep you safe.’”
FBI Director Kash Patel ludicrously claimed that Jian and Liu’s case was “a sobering reminder that the CCP is working around the clock to deploy operatives and researchers to infiltrate American institutions and target our food supply, which would have grave consequences…putting American lives and our economy at serious risk.”
A federal prosecutor admitted at Ms. Jian’s sentencing that she had harbored no evil intent, and Dr. Roger Innes, a biology professor at Indiana University who reviewed the evidence in Jian’s case, stated unequivocally that there was “no risk to U.S. farmers, or anyone else.”[4]
Professor Innes tried to assist Youhuang Xiang, a 32-year-old post-doctoral research associate at Indiana University (IU), who was arrested in November 2025 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, for transporting E. coli bacteria containing plasmid DNA, allegedly in women’s underwear.
Fox News headlines evoked images of poisoned lettuce and a fragile food supply under attack from foreign agents, though filings described materials consistent with common laboratory E. coli strains which are non-pathogenic and incapable of surviving outside controlled culture conditions.[5]
After Mr. Xiang’s arrest, Innes said that FBI agents took notebooks, laptops and hard drives from him and other researchers for investigation, which have not been returned.
Despite being certified in compliance with Department of Agriculture regulations, the Indiana University Biology Department terminated a research agreement with Innes’s lab without providing an explanation. Indiana University also told Innes he was not allowed to exchange biological materials with a researcher in China “due to the ongoing federal investigation.”
These measures exemplify the university’s siding with the federal government over its students and faculty.
The World Socialist Web Site noted that, one week after Wang’s death, University of Michigan President Domenico Grasso testified before the House Committee on Education at a hearing titled “U.S. Universities Under Siege: Foreign Espionage, Stolen Innovation, and the National Security Threat” that he had ended relationship with a university in China seen as a potential threat to America’s interest after consultation with the House Select Committee on the CCP.
A 13-year U.S. army veteran who holds a Ph.D. in environmental engineering from the University of Michigan, Grasso also boasted of terminating the visas of five Chinese researchers and acting swiftly and decisively to sever ties with the scientists who had been arrested.[6]
In response to a World Socialist Web Site article that was removed from the University of Michigan subreddit, a Chinese student wrote: “Not everyone here is affiliated with the CCP. Some of us are just trying to live a normal life…Whatever the case, this absurd ‘witch-hunt’ operation targeting Chinese scholars needs to be stopped.”
The World Socialist Web Site suggests the University of Michigan’s institutional complicity is “rooted in the financial structure of U.S. academia, which has become heavily dependent on federal research funding from the defense and intelligence sectors.”
The University of Michigan is a “highly integrated beneficiary of the capitalist military-industrial complex, securing $100 million in direct research support from the Department of Defense for 2025 alone, an increase from $85 million the previous year.”
This funding supports critical defense projects such as the development of heat-tolerant silicon carbide semiconductors for military aircraft, and autonomous off-road vehicles designed for combat zones.
The World Socialist Web Site noted that, “to protect this revenue stream and maintain its institutional standing in a national climate dominated by imperialist war-mongering, the university administration facilitated the purge of its own researchers, acting as accomplices of the FBI.”
CodePink’s petition to the University of Michigan noted that, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio vowed to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students,” the “University of Michigan, in multiple cases, aided this racialized crackdown” and otherwise “provided information to federal agents” and access that enabled “unjust detentions.”
The petition went on to note that, under the now-defunct “China Initiative,” dozens of Chinese and Chinese-American researchers were “falsely accused of espionage, their careers destroyed by baseless investigations and racial profiling.”[7]
In 2022, Jane Wu, a post-doctoral scholar at Northwestern University, “took her own life after being falsely accused of spying.” Despite being cleared of all allegations, she was “forced into a psychiatric facility, lost her lab, and was abandoned by her university. Her family is now suing Northwestern for the discrimination and institutional abuse that led to her death.”
According to CodePink, Wu’s story—like Danhao Wang’s—is a warning to all U.S. universities: Silence or complicity in federal government persecution has deadly consequences.
Target China
The U.S. government’s war on Chinese scientists and efforts to win the “chip war,” is part of a larger foreign policy strategy that aims to destroy China as a threat to U.S. global hegemony.
In an informative article in New Eastern Outlook Brian Berletic argues that China is the main target of the U.S. war in Iran, which, rather than being driven by Israel, is part of a “decades-spanning U.S. project” to assume “complete control over the Middle East’s oil supply” and block geopolitical rivals from benefitting from access to it.
Berletic writes that the U.S. intent is to cut off Iranian oil supplies to China and the rest of Asia and to have U.S. based oil and gas companies pick up the market share as they have in Europe as a result of the Ukraine War, where the U.S. and Ukraine are increasingly targeting the Russian oil industry through drone attacks, having already destroyed the Nordstream pipeline that would have brought cheap natural gas from Russia to Europe.
Pointing out how the Venezuelan government immediately cut off oil exports to China after Nicolás Maduro’s kidnapping, Berletic emphasizes that a long-term goal of U.S. foreign policy is to transform Asian countries surrounding China like the Philippines, Vietnam, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan into oil-dependant U.S. satrapies capable of serving as a base for war on China.
The way to achieve this is by cutting off the oil supply from the Middle East and by forcing these countries to buy Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) from U.S. based producers, which are more and more seeking overseas markets because of the hydraulic fracturing boom and so-called shale energy revolution that transformed the U.S. into the world’s leading energy producer.
By the early 2030s, the U.S. is expected to double its LNG export capacity, making it capable of meeting the demands of key Asian proxies, including South Korea, Taiwan, Japan—but only if cheaper and more reliable alternatives from the Middle East remain off the market.
Berletic sees as significant the fact that in 2025, U.S.-based energy corporation Glenfarne and its CEO Brendan Duval repeatedly mentioned the fact that their new LNG project under construction in Alaska could export energy to Asia “through uncontested and safe shipping lanes.” Currently, LNG is being shipped to Asia increasingly from terminals in Mexico.
According to Berletic, the U.S. bombing of Iran fit with the larger grand strategy by strategically targeting Iranian oil production and Kharg Island, Iran’s key energy export facility, and by imposing a blockade on the Strait of Hormuz targeting ships exporting energy from Iran to China and the rest of Asia.
Iran’s retaliatory strikes on America’s Persian Gulf state proxies, Kuwait, Qatar, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, further led to reduced oil production and lowered energy exports to China and Asia.
From the late-February start of hostilities to the April ceasefire agreement, energy exports from the Middle East to China dropped from approximately 52% of China’s total imported needs to around 30%. A March 2026 Politico article noted that Asia depends on energy imports from the Middle East for between 70% and 90% of their total energy import needs—especially U.S. client states like Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan.
Berletic writes that “with the U.S. war [on Iran being] open-ended—having continued from late 2024 to today—with only months of relative calm between US campaigns of military aggression, the prospects of accessing affordable and reliable energy from the Middle East for China and the rest of Asia are steadily fading…a recent US Senate hearing has made it clear nations like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines will be shaped into military industrial outposts of US power in the region, helping minimize the “tyranny of distance” the US is faced with when provoking war with China on the other side of the planet from where the US is actually located.”
Berletic added that “the creation of factories making US weapons in Asia and port facilities in the region for implementing repairs on US ships is [also] already underway, with Japan having manufactured and, in some cases, even sending back to America Patriot missile interceptors and South Korea securing deals to maintain US naval cargo vessels.”
All of these preparations are taking place, Berletic says, ahead of what the U.S. sees as “an inevitable confrontation with China—which is ultimately the priority driving U.S. conflict against Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and many other nations in the first place, all as a means of first isolating and containing China before confronting it directly.”
The Chinese Consulate in Chicago added this comment on X: “For some time now, the U.S. has overstretched the concept of national security for political manipulation and groundlessly interrogated and harassed Chinese students and scholars.” ↑
See Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology (New York: Scribner, 2022). Some people suspect that Wang did not commit suicide but, rather, was murdered as part of the geopolitical battle that is now playing out in the scientific arena. ↑
Jerome F. Gorgon, Jr., the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said the three men who were charged were part of a “long and alarming pattern of criminal activities committed by Chinese Nationals under the cover of the University of Michigan.” ↑
Jian’s lawyer, Norman Zalkind, told the New York Post that his client was sent back to China two days after she entered her guilty plea and said the feds blew her crimes out of proportion. “They shouldn’t have brought these kinds of cases, they are not serious cases,” Zalkind said. “The administration made them [appear] much more serious than they really are. They said their research was really harmful to the U.S., but it wasn’t.” ↑
Ian Oxnevad wrote in an article entitled “A Conviction and a Suspicious Death are the Latest in Beijing’s Campus Spy Game,” in Minding the Campus, a conservative website focused on higher education, that Xiang obtained a Ph.D. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), which he said is led by CCP political appointees, and has been working with China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) since 2018. Even if true, these facts do not offer any evidence that Xiang is somehow a spy or even connected to the CCP. Oxnevad, who appears to have an intelligence background, goes on to claim that Xiang lied on a Customs form about his CCP affiliation and that he and Wang reflect on the CCP’s efforts to infiltrate American college campuses and steal U.S. military technology. ↑
At that hearing, Representative Haley Stevens (D-MI) championed her draconian U.S. research protection bill, which broadens the legal definition of partnership with so-called “malign foreign talent programs” to include any program that provides “indirect benefits” to targeted nations such as China. This transforms routine academic exchanges, access to international laboratories, shared research data, or even the co-authorship of scientific papers into potential grounds for federal prosecution, detention and deportation. ↑
Universities were also complicit in the baseless investigations and profiling. One example is the University of Kansas which terminated Feng “Franklin” Tao, who was falsely prosecuted under the Department of Justice’s China Initiative on espionage charges and failing to disclose specific information on a conflict-of-interest form. All the charges were dismissed in court. Dr. Feng’s lawsuit alleges that the University of Kansas collaborated with the FBI to conduct illegal surveillance on him and violated a signed agreement on his employment status. The then-deputy general counsel of the university addressed the FBI agents as though they were friends and congratulated the FBI upon the arrest of Tao. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of eight books, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025), and Political Assassinations in America: The Intricate Nexus of Deep State Crime (Clarity Press, 2026).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
