March 1, 2026: Last month another Chinese biolab was discovered in Las Vegas. The police had received an anonymous tip that a biolab was operating inside a home. Police then raided the home and found over a thousand items that were stored in the adjacent garage along with chemical laboratory equipment including centrifuges and other equipment as well commercial refrigerators. The owner of the home was a Jia Bei Zhu, who was already in custody since 2023 because of another illegal biolab in a California town. The owners of both labs had ties to the Chinese government.

Six years ago an American and two Chinese were indicted for secretly providing China with U.S. technology. The American was Charles Lieber, head of the Harvard Chemistry and Chemical Biology department. He was accused of secretly establishing a working relationship with a Chinese university at Wuhan. Lieber established research efforts at Harvard, recruiting top scientists to work on projects of interest to China and secretly passing research results to China. He also received millions of dollars from China to further this research. During the FBI investigation Lieber repeatedly lied about these activities, which did not prevent the FBI from eventually gathering all they needed to arrest Lieber and indict him. It is rare for China to convince a senior American academic, like Harvard department head Charles Lieber, to get involved in illegal research projects. Why Lieber got involved in such blatantly illegal activities was not disclosed and details probably won’t emerge until his trial.

Also indicted for Harvard-related espionage was a Chinese citizen, Zheng Zaosong, who was studying at Harvard on a student visa and was accused of trying to smuggle 21 vials of biological material and research data back to China. The third defendant was Yanqing Yeh, a Chinese student at nearby Boston University. She was also an active duty lieutenant in the Chinese Army who was supervised by a colonel at a Chinese military academy that was working on new technology for the Chinese military. This school was on an American list of Chinese educational institutions that were banned from working with anyone in the United States. Yeh was also caught trying to smuggle research data back to China. Yeh had lied about her military status when she applied for a student visa, asserting that she had been discharged from the army, and left out her connections with the banned in the United States Chinese military academy she was working for as an army officer. She was also accused of being an unregistered foreign agent. Among the items uncovered by the FBI was that Yeh had been assigned to investigate one American academic at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School who was researching computer security. Given how active China has been using hackers to steal valuable data from the United States, that particular assignment was ominous. Yeah had presented herself as a student but further investigation showed she was a very active Chinese spy.

It is illegal for American academics and researchers to secretly work for Chinese government or commercial firms. These restrictions won’t trigger similar measures for Americans in China because China has long assigned police and intel specialists to closely observe who visiting Americans visit. This surveillance often involves MSS secret police agents advising Chinese to refuse such meetings or only do it with an MSS agent present, usually pretending to be an employee of the firm.