Agriculture has traditionally been a fruitful area for China-U.S. cooperation, dating back to the two countries’ resumption of diplomatic relations in the 1970s. Now it is just another area marked by Sino-American distrust, as Washington hunts Chinese agriscience “spies” and Beijing races to reduce reliance on U.S. farm exports.
Illustration by Luis Grañena
In June, Kash Patel, the combative pundit-turned-FBI director, made an alarming announcement. A young Chinese researcher at the University of Michigan had been arrested by federal agents after allegedly helping to smuggle a fungus into the United States called Fusarium graminearum, “an agroterrorism agent,” Patel said on X.
A press release from the U.S. Attorney's Office on charges brought against Jian and Liu, June 3, 2025. Credit: DOJ
The widely-studied fungus can cause head blight,
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Not content to run the world’s second most powerful country for a decade, Xi Jinping set about changing everything everywhere all at once. In an excerpt from their new book, Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung examine how Xi seized personal control of China’s foreign policy apparatuses.
The academic talks about whether China’s experience shows there can be such a thing as ‘good environmental authoritarianism’, and what the U.S. could learn from its approach to green policy.
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