The director of the FBI, Kash Patel, has announced on Twitter-X that another Chinese national has been arrested for “smuggling biological materials into the U.S. and lying to federal agents” (June 9, 2025).
This individual is Chengxuan Han, a citizen of the People’s Republic of China and a Ph.D. student in Wuhan, China. Han is the third PRC connected individual charged on similar allegations in recent days.
Han is alleged to have sent four packages to the U.S. from China containing a biological material related to roundworms—addressed to individuals associated with a lab at the University of Michigan.
Upon arriving at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport on June 8, Han allegedly made false statements to federal officials regarding the packages she had previously mailed—and had erased her electronic device just days prior.
In a follow-up interview with FBI and ICE HSI agents, Han admitted to sending the packages and lying about their contents.
This case is part of a broader effort from the FBI and our federal partners to heavily crack down on similar pathogen-smuggling operations as the CCP works relentlessly to undermine America’s research institutions.
“Undermine research institutions” sounds like a rather abbreviated summary of the possibilities.
We don’t seem to have details yet on ultimate plans or why roundworms or “biological material related to roundworms” had to be brought into the U.S. Is there something different about the Chinese roundworms? Had they been genetically engineered in China? Perhaps an American provenance would have sufficed but for the possibility of too many questions being asked.
Han is a doctoral student at Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, China, ground zero of the COVID-19 pandemic. The New York Post reports that Han “was denied a visa to travel to the US on two separate occasions in March. In one of her attempts to obtain a visa, Han ‘could not clearly answer basic questions about herself or her research,’ according to court documents.”
Yungqing Jian and Junyong Liu
Last week, another Chinese researcher, Yunqing Jian, was charged for repeatedly attempting, with the help of her boyfriend Zunyong Liu, to smuggle the crop-killing fungus Fusarium graminearum into the United States. According to the FBI, Jian’s electronics “contain information describing her membership in and loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party,” which had funded her research on the pathogen in China.
For whatever reason, Liu was not also charged but instead allowed to return to China.
Patel called the case of Jian and Liu “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.”
