06/17/2021 / By Ethan Huff
New evidence has surfaced to suggest that communist China’s continued theft of American intellectual property extends to biotechnology.
In 2011, a Chinese businessman was reportedly caught crawling through genetically modified (GMO) corn rows in Iowa on two separate occasions, pocketing transgenic seeds owned by Pioneer and Monsanto.
Mo Hailong, the U.S. director of international business for Beijing Dabeinong Technology Group, was apparently mailing the “high-value” seeds to a relative of his in China, a multi-year FBI investigation found. Hailong and several Chinese cohorts were later arrested after they tried to smuggle more seeds out of the country using a façade of microwave popcorn bags and Subway napkins.
Hailong ended up serving 36 months in prison, and it was determined that he had successfully sent a massive haul of Monsanto’s GMO seeds to China undetected prior to getting caught.
Another Chinese man, Weiqiang Zhang, did much the same thing, though his heist was much more advanced and involved the theft of not just corn seeds but also rice, soybean and wheat seeds.
After weaseling his way into a biotech crop production program at Kansas State University, followed by a rice genetics program at Louisiana State University, Zhang ended up locking in a position at Ventria, a private biopharmaceutical corporation based out of Kansas that was using GMO rice to produce recombinant proteins.
Zhang gained access to a climate-controlled seed room and successfully stole $75 million worth of samples. After that, he used USDA letterhead to send counterfeit letters to six crop research colleagues in China, inviting them to come visit Ventria and several other companies doing similar research.
The delegation accepted the invitation and came for the tour, only to be intercepted by U.S. Customs during a routine luggage inspection that ended up revealing all the stolen loot.
A few years later, another Chinese spy by the name of Haitao Xiang got a job at Monsanto as an imaging scientist at The Climate Corporation. This program involved a big data platform with a proprietary algorithm called “Nutrient Optimizer” that Xiang later tried to steal using a micro-SD card.
He was caught at the airport upon attempting to fly back to China with it, his one-way ticket in hand. This particular incident made headlines, and experts say it is little more than a tiny glimpse into the dark underbelly of Chinese theft.
“It’s fair to label these cases as tip of the iceberg or tip of the dinner fork,” contends Col. (Ret.) John Mills, a national security professional and former Director of Cybersecurity Policy, Strategy, and International Affairs at the Department of Defense (DoD).
“I mean they are a drop in the bucket. For so long, U.S. counterintelligence has been focused on Russia, yet China presents a threat many orders of magnitude greater. China is intent on cataloguing seed and DNA on a vast scale, and they’ve spent at least 10 years vacuuming up every piece of tech from every sector in the U.S. You can be absolutely certain: Agriculture is right up there at the top and this is happening right now.”
China is also focused on acquiring as much farmland as it possibly can, into which it presumably wants to plant all those stolen seeds to claim as its own. China only knows theft, having never produced anything of actual value that it did not first steal – and even that ends up being a cheap-quality knockoff that either breaks or does not work.
China is nothing more than a parasite to the world, in other words. It continues to be a threat with nothing to contribute other than crime, lies and eventually war.
More related news about communist China can be found at Tyranny.news.
Sources for this article include:
Tagged Under: agriculture, biotech, China, espionage, farming, GMO, GMOs, harvest, intellectual property, Monsanto, national security, seeds, theft
COPYRIGHT © 2020 CommunistChina.News
All content posted on this site is protected under Free Speech. CommunistChina.News is not responsible for content written by contributing authors. The information on this site is provided for educational and entertainment purposes only. It is not intended as a substitute for professional advice of any kind. CommunistChina.News assumes no responsibility for the use or misuse of this material. All trademarks, registered trademarks and service marks mentioned on this site are the property of their respective owners.