A plot by a Chinese couple to smuggle a dangerous pathogen into the U.S. for study at the University of Michigan is one of several strikes against the college, Adam Savit, director of the China Policy Initiative at the America First Policy Institute, told Newsmax on Sunday.
“I’d like to take the opportunity to, unfortunately, spotlight the University of Michigan in this case because I think it’s a case study on this problem,” he told Newsmax’s “Sunday Report.” “A couple of days ago, I was referring to the four strikes against the University of Michigan. I came across another one. So let’s call it five strikes regarding their foreign students infiltrating and causing these problems.”
He noted that last year, a report, “CCP on the Quad: How American Taxpayers and Universities Fund the CCP’s Advanced Military and Technological Research,” was prepared by the House Select Committee on China, highlighting 21 public universities partnering with Chinese colleges with ties to the People’s Liberation Army.
“The University of Michigan was one of those,” Savit said. “To their credit, they withdrew from that program earlier this year. But there are two military-related strikes against them.”
First, five Chinese students showed up at the Camp Grayling National Guard base in Michigan, where Taiwanese military personnel were being trained.
Second, Chinese students from the university traveled to a naval air station in Florida to take pictures.
“A University of Michigan Chinese student voted in our elections,” he added. “They were caught, but they skipped the country a day before President Trump’s inauguration.”
And now, with the pathogen, a fungus that could infect crops, the breaches are “systematic,” said Savit.
“This is a huge problem,” he said. “This is going on at other university campuses. This is perhaps just the most prominent.”
Kip Tom, a former ambassador of the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture under Trump and vice chair of Rural Policy at the America First Policy Institute, who was also on Sunday’s program, said the fungus the students brought in had the “capacity to replicate, reproduce itself at a very rapid rate and spread itself across the country in various forms.”
He added that there were potentially plans to spread the fungus across the country, with nearly 150 million acres of crops affected out of the 340 million acres produced in the U.S., marking a large risk for the country.
Meanwhile, the Chinese Communist Party has its National Intelligence Law of 2017, which lets it leverage its citizens anywhere in the world, including the U.S., to give the government data it has collected to engage in surveillance activity, said Savit.
“In the West, we think of ourselves as individual citizens with individual agency,” he said. “Unfortunately, these students and other nationals in the U.S. don’t have free will. Even if they love the United States and they want to just get an education, their family can be leveraged back home. They can have threats. This is a big problem that we don’t get our heads around as free people.”
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