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China’s mystery seeds are an ongoing attack on America’s food supply
In January, the Texas Department of Agriculture reported that last year it had collected, from 109 locations, 1,101 packs of seeds that had been sent unsolicited to people in the Lone Star State. The first instance was in Clute, a city south of Houston, where a person received from China a package containing “unidentified seeds and an unknown liquid.”
Last year, unsolicited seeds were sent to Texas parties by China’s online retailer Temu. There were similar instances in 2025 reported by the Ohio Department of Agriculture, the New Mexico Department of Agriculture and the Alabama Cooperative Extension System.
The unsolicited mailings follow those at the beginning of the decade. In 2020, residents of all 50 states received packages of seeds, sent unsolicited from China. Many of the packages, mailed through the Chinese state-run postal system, were mislabeled as “jewelry” for U.S. Customs purposes.
“Treat them like they are radioactive, like they are Kryptonite,” said Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller in 2020. His most recent warning was equally urgent.
“At a glance, this might seem like a small problem, but this is serious business,” Miller said in January. “The possible introduction of an invasive species to the state via these seeds poses real risks to Texas families and the agriculture industry.”
The incidents form a pattern: China’s regime is attacking America’s food supply. Last June, three Chinese nationals were charged with various crimes, including attempting to smuggle biological agents into the United States.
One of them, Yunqing Jian, was charged with trying to bring in Fusarium graminearum, a “potential agroterrorism weapon” that causes “head blight.” This fungal disease attacks wheat, barley, maize and rice and “is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year.”
In humans and livestock, head blight causes “vomiting, liver damage and reproductive defects.” U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon, Jr. of Michigan’s Eastern District said that the actions of these Chinese researchers represented “the gravest national security concerns.”
Dr. Sean Lin, a former lab director of the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, said Chinese research institutes, including the Institute of Rice Biology at Zhejiang University, have been actively studying this particular fungus.
“The FBI confiscated samples labeled ‘ARP9,’” a gene “known to influence chromatin remodeling and gene transcription,” Lin told me. “This suggests the samples were genetically modified strains of Fusarium graminearum.”
If the fungus strain was in fact modified, Chinese researchers probably were trying to make the pathogen more transmissible or more pesticide resistant.
Zunyong Liu, one of the three researchers charged last June, was affiliated with Zhejiang University, where he studied the same fungus. That institution, Lin says, has a well-documented collaboration with the People’s Liberation Army.
“China’s military-civil fusion strategy makes it reasonable to speculate about military interest in these genetically modified pathogens, which are potentially related to biological warfare or agroterrorism.”
Malign intent is evident because the Chinese researchers risked their careers by smuggling a pathogen, something they would almost certainly not have done if their activities were legitimate.
The relations with the Communist Party — Jian is a member — and the probable connections with military research in China are particularly disturbing. Brandon Weichert, author of “Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life,” told me in June that “These agents can be weapons of mass destruction and their introduction into the United States could very well have been preparation for a biological weapons attack.”
In November, three more Chinese nationals were charged with conspiracy to smuggle round worms, which were genetically modified, into the U.S. Chengxuan Han, one of the individuals charged in June, was also involved in the round worm incident.
The threat is clear, as Rep. Zach Nunn (R-Iowa) told the American First Policy Institute in July. The pathogens the Chinese brought in “could wipe out entire harvests.”
That’s especially true because the U.S. “remains critically at risk of a biological event,” as Dr. Asha George, executive director of the Bipartisan Commission on Biodefense, warned the House Committee on Homeland Security’s Subcommittee on Emergency Management and Technology in written testimony last September.
The lack of defense is perplexing. James Kraska of the Naval War College pointed out that China, with its “secretive importation of the dangerous fungus,” was probably violating the Biological Weapons Convention.
As Nunn said, “this is biological warfare with no shots fired.”
“The Chinese smuggling of agricultural pathogens is part of the preparation for a full-spectrum campaign,” Weichert, also senior national security editor at the National Interest, said to me earlier this month. “This is China’s ‘unrestricted warfare’ aimed straight at the American people themselves.”
Gordon G. Chang is the author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America” and “The Coming Collapse of China.”
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