Extra: Agroterrorism? AI Weaponization? Student Spies? ... A Look At How China Is Trying To Undermine the U.S.
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This is the Fox News Rundown Extra. I'm Dave Anthony. Today, agro-terrorism? That is the latest potential Chinese threat to the U.S. On top of all the worry about cyber attacks and spying and TikTok and Taiwan and the theft of intellectual property, in the last few weeks...

Three Chinese nationals have been charged in the U.S. Two of them had court hearings the other day, while the other remains in China. That's Zeng Yongliu, who went back to that country after being stopped at Detroit's airport last year with a dangerous fungus in his luggage. One the Justice Department maintains could have done billions of dollars in economic damages to food crops in the U.S., from wheat to barley to rice. And at the same time,

That fungus could have made people sick, even lead to liver and reproductive damage.

Now, the indictment against Liu and his girlfriend, Youngkin Jeon, says they attempted that research on that fungus at the University of Michigan. The same place another Chinese national, Shengshuan Han, was planning to study roundworms after she allegedly mailed genetic material from those worms to the U.S. before her arrival and arrest. Now, we talked about these cases, and China's continued meddling in the U.S., with a former diplomat, Jim Lewis, who...

who had more to say about the threat, which she kind of downplayed, than we could fit into our regular rundown segment the other day. Well, he downplayed the agro-terrorism threat, not the overall Chinese threat to the U.S., which he says is serious. You're about to hear the entire conversation, something we do every weekend, posting these extras with our rundown guests. We hope you like them, in addition to everything else on the rundown. You know, there's new stuff every day.

Thank you, as always, for listening. And now Jim Lewis on the Fox News Rundown Extra.

Joining us on the Fox News Rundown is Jim Lewis. He's a former diplomat with the Senior Executive Services in the U.S. government, also a senior advisor with CIS. Good to have you on, Jim, as we talk about the latest stories out of China, concern about espionage, concern about agro-terrorism, even concern about artificial intelligence. Thanks for being here.

Great. Thanks for having me on the show. So certainly China is under scrutiny for a lot of different factors and a lot of different reasons here in the U.S. The latest, though, with these arrests, three Chinese nationals facing charges in the last week here in the U.S. The latest one is someone who tried to smuggle materials into the U.S. out of the university that's in Wuhan, China. Your reaction to what we've seen in the last week?

Usually espionage involves taking stuff out, not smuggling stuff in. So my guess is it was some student who wanted to continue their research and couldn't get permission to do it, so they smuggled stuff in. That's not to say there isn't a lot of Chinese espionage. It's the most intense espionage campaign against the U.S. we've ever seen. But usually it's not people trying to smuggle stuff in, unless they're drug runners, and none of these were drugs.

But the one in just this past week, the other day, this involves concealed worm specimens, and both these cases involve the University of Michigan. Is that odd to you?

No, because universities are really popular for Chinese students. They would want to come there. And the universities love them because they pay full fare, right? So they are a source of subsidy. But the Chinese have been spying on, they spy on everything. And so agriculture is just one of the things they spy on. My favorite story is still the Chinese scientist caught

crawling around a cornfield in the middle of the night in Iowa to pick up genetically modified seeds. They're eager to get ahead, and they know the U.S. is the place to come to do that. So the case that is the one from last week is,

involves this fungus that they were bringing in. One of them was caught, this was last year, with this fungus trying to bring into the United States and study further at the University of Michigan. This was one that is being considered potentially agro-terrorism. Do you agree with that, that it should be looked at as that?

Probably not. I mean, some student wants to continue doing their research at a better facility in the US. The Chinese government doesn't need to, they don't like us at all, but they don't need to pick a fight with us. And they know that agro-terrorism would unleash, especially under President Trump, it would unleash a response they really wouldn't want to have to deal with. So

It was a dumb idea. It's part of a larger espionage effort, but I don't think it was agroterrorism. But this fungus is really potentially dangerous. They say economically, if it was unleashed, it could cause billions of dollars worth of economic losses. Crops like wheat and barley and rice can cause problems for people in your stomach, liver damage in the reproductive system. So, I mean, some might not agree with you that it's just somebody trying to do better research.

Well, this is back to the old COVID argument, which was, did it escape from a Chinese lab? And the answer is, we don't know, but there's always suspicion. So Chinese labs don't always have the same safety protocols that you see anywhere else in the world. And that means they're going to do things that are dangerous online.

Why they do it, I don't know, but that's probably what it was. It's another one of these badly conceived experiments that was a little too dangerous for any reasonable country.

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You know, when they found this at Detroit, both of these cases came out of, you know, the Detroit airport. They found this in the Chinese nationals' luggage, and obviously they weren't looking for fungus, but they did a pretty good job, I guess. You know, everyone from China is getting extra scrutiny. It may not be deserved, but in some cases it's certainly justified, and this is...

something the Chinese brought on themselves because they do things like try and smuggle fungus in or try and smuggle microchips out their behavior is not one that you'd call respectful for the United States so this guy may have felt like the laws didn't apply laws didn't apply to him uh it was a mistake but

Big things like destroying food crops in the U.S., the Chinese know that would get them into a huge amount of trouble. So I think the government at least would be cautious. They're not going to do something. You know, there is concern in farm parts and rural parts of the United States of the Chinese buying up farmland.

Is that something that is a goal of theirs? They want to expand like that in the U.S.? What is happening here? Amazingly enough, I'm sure it's just a coincidence, a lot of these farms happen to be located next to military bases. And so that's a real concern that Chinese use.

Of course that's coincidence. China wouldn't plan something like that. And it's happened so often that, you know, even anyone would be suspicious. So there's a couple of things going on. The first is it's part of an intelligence effort. If you locate next to an air base or a missile base or an army base, you can collect radio signals. You can observe what's going on. Second, and this is a hint about China specifically,

People in China are looking for ways to get their money out. They're not at all concerned about the U.S. economy. They're concerned about the Chinese economy. And so we see this all the time. And a good way to do money laundering to get money out of China is to buy real estate in the United States. But

This is a blend of motives. Some of them are clearly espionage. That's why the laws have been changed to allow the U.S. to regulate foreign acquisitions of agricultural land. Some of them are just Chinese people with enough money who want to get it out of Beijing.

And, you know, you talk about surveillance and military bases. Obviously, it's not long ago we had the big Chinese spy balloon controversy that went across the United States. And what was that? And now that we look back, and you certainly have studied this, what happened with that? What surveillance did China actually get? The...

It sounds harmless, right? In fact, I thought the Chinese, they should have used like a Mickey Mouse shaped balloon or something to persuade us it was harmless. They didn't. The payload on the balloon was probably the size of a school bus. It was huge. And that's because it was crammed full of electronic gear. Floating overhead gives you a chance to acquire people's cell phone calls, acquire their radio transmissions, acquire in-flight communications, and

the chinese do this all the time over guam over taiwan and i guess they figured well what the heck will give it a try against the united states turned out to be a bad idea but that's what it was doing it was basically a very low orbit spy satellite um

A little, nobody in their right mind would use a balloon because the balloon goes where the wind wants to go. And, you know, the Chinese kind of launched it and hoped it would float over something interesting. But it's not a good idea to be doing that to your neighbors because the intention was espionage. But did it float over anything interesting? Do you think they got something? I mean, there were people who wished that it was shot down. Yeah.

I would have shot it down earlier. There was this concern, and so that's puzzling, the concern that it would fall on someone's head in Montana. There aren't that many people in Montana. Shoot it down, and it's unlikely to bump into something. What we don't know because of the...

nature of the spacecraft or the aircraft, I guess it is, is how far out it could detect. Could it detect signals from five miles away? Could it detect signals from 30 miles away? A lot depends on its collection range. And so if it was a 30 mile collection range, a 50 mile collection range, yes, it got some interesting stuff. That's why it was a good idea to shoot it down. Was it transmitting real time back to China? I mean, how is it working?

Absolutely. So that's kind of how this whole thing works. There's satellites, we have them, the Chinese have them, the Russians have them, whose only job is to retransmit. So you get a collection like from the balloon, the signal goes up into space, rendezvous with the Chinese satellite, and then it's retransmitted to China.

That saves you a lot of power. It saves you a lot of time. That's standard practice. And I assume that's what the Chinese were doing.

So give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch.

You know, back to the students, and we talked about the arrests here in the last week. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump administration, they want to revoke visas for a lot of Chinese students coming to the United States. Do you think that's the right move?

You know, I don't know if you saw, but the woman who gave the commencement speech at Harvard was Chinese, a Chinese student, not Chinese American. By the way, we've never had a case of a Chinese American being found spying for China. They know China and they don't like it. But this was a Chinese student, lives in China, and she quoted from Xi Jinping. She quoted the Chinese Party's communist line in the commencement address. So I think...

Jerking the chain a little bit is not a bad idea. The flip side of that is we tend to gain more. I've talked to university presidents, and what they say is, look, if you don't let me bring in Chinese students, 40% of my lab spaces will be unoccupied. My research will fall on hard times. So there's a benefit to having Chinese students. They pay full freight. They help with research. But there's a cost, which is some of them have jobs

political motives dictated by the Chinese state. Are they forced to? I mean, do they have to pledge an allegiance to the Communist Party before they come here? No, they don't have to pledge allegiance, but it's a mix. I mean, some of them are coerced. There's always the threat of coercion because your family's still back in China, and the Chinese government is not shy about saying, we'll threaten your family if you don't cooperate.

Others are looking to the future and saying, I want to get in good with the government, and so I'm going to help them out. So it's a mix of motives. Both apply. Artificial intelligence certainly is here, and it's growing, and it's creeping into everything.

Now, there is a report that says that there have been a lot of chat GPT misuses with OpenAI, and the company basically says a lot of that comes from China. Probably not a surprise to you. Well, you have to feel bad for the Chinese because the Chinese are deeply persuaded that controlling the narrative, that controlling the story that goes out is crucial.

And what we found is they put huge effort into it, like this chat GTP exercise, and no Americans are persuaded by it. Right. So that doesn't mean they're going to give up. It doesn't mean they're going to stop trying. It works in other places. It works in Asia better than it works here. What are they trying to do with it? What are they trying to accomplish with chat GPT?

They're trying to persuade you that China's rise is inevitable, it will be globally dominant, and that the US is wicked, corrupt, and needs to be displaced.

That's the message. And you can see Chinese propaganda if you want. It's not that much fun, but that's their goal. We're the ones who are the future of mankind and everyone should accept that China is the world's leader. They will say things like that sometimes, not always, but that's their goal is to make the case China is a success, the US is a failure. We're the ones you should bet on. - Yeah, and it's that kind of Chinese propaganda that had,

Congress and President Biden signing the law to ban TikTok in the U.S. and President Trump's put that off trying to get a deal to have the Chinese parent company sell TikTok off and have, you know, get rid of that kind of a tie. Is that possible? Do you think it's the right move? Do you like the TikTok ban?

I think that you can come up with a deal, and they were very close to getting a deal. They may get one now, that does things like monitoring what software comes in from China, monitoring content, providing oversight of TikTok's operations in the U.S. I think there's a deal that would reduce risk to a manageable, even a negligible proportion.

Right now, the Chinese are holding any TikTok deal hostage to the trade talks. A couple of months ago, they said, OK, OK, let the market do it. Remember, the people who own TikTok, they want to sell. They want to get out of this. And the Chinese, after a while, finally said, OK, let the market take its course. And now, of course, with the trade talks, it's being held hostage. It's a chip in the trade negotiations that both sides can use.

We've heard over and over again from officials, including the last FBI director, Christopher Wray, China is our number one threat. Do you agree?

Completely. The Chinese are responsible for more than any other country in the world when it comes to espionage, even more than the Russians, the Iranians, you name it. China is number one when it comes to spying. Jim Lewis, former diplomat with the Senior Executive Service in the U.S. government, senior advisor now for CSIS. Great to talk to you, Jim. Thanks so much. Thanks a lot. ♪

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