When five Chinese nationals were caught allegedly taking photos near classified military equipment at Camp Grayling in Northern Michigan in 2023, it wasn’t an isolated incident.
Instead, it’s part of a “constant probing” of military installations, the head of the Michigan National Guard told state lawmakers Wednesday, Nov. 5.
“The People’s Republic of China are very active in their information gathering, intelligence collection,” said Major General Paul D. Rogers, the adjutant general of the Michigan National Guard. “You see it through businesses, you see it through military sites, training. It’s not uncommon. I’d almost say it’s pretty routine for Chinese nationals ... to be tasked to go somewhere and actively try to get onto a base, a military base, try to gain entry into a restricted area, and if they get entry, to collect certain pieces of information, whatever it may be of interest.
“But it’s fairly routine and well established that this is an active, ongoing – I’ll use the word ‘operation’ – on their part.”
Rogers gave those remarks before the Michigan House Committee on Homeland Security and Foreign Influence, where he was slated to talk about homeland security issues facing the state.
Rogers mentioned an incident last year, when two Chinese nationals arrived at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Macomb County and told the guards they were interested in going to the military air museum located on the base.
The pair was turned away because they weren’t allowed to have access, Rogers said. Rogers acknowledged it could have been a benign interest in military aircraft but said the pair’s return three days later suggested otherwise.
“The fact that those same two individuals showed up three days later at the same gate hoping to find a guard that would not be doing their due diligence and tried to gain access again using the exact same excuse – it’s a constant probing,” Rogers said. “And it’s a little cat and mouse and they’re not breaking any laws, right? So there’s nothing that can be done about it. But, you know, it’s not with good intent.”
The incident at Camp Grayling, the training facility for the Michigan Army National Guard in northern Michigan, happened during a training exercise in August 2023.
About 7,000 military officials, including some from Taiwan, were participating in the live firing exercises. China has consistently challenged Taiwan’s sovereignty.
An FBI complaint against the five Chinese nationals – all University of Michigan students at the time – alleges they were found on the base property taking photos near classified equipment and soldiers sleeping in tents. The group was told to leave.
An investigation was launched and the students were interrogated. While they weren’t charged with espionage, they were charged with conspiracy, making false statements to investigators and destroying records during the federal investigation.
Those charges were filed Oct. 1, 2024, months after the students – Zhekai Xu, Renxiang Guan, Haoming Zhu, Jingzhe Tao and Yi Liang – left the country after graduating that May from UM.
Rogers said the students were able to be identified thanks to cooperation between federal, state and local agencies and the establishment of a process for “tracking activities.”
“That’s how we were able to detect those five individuals in the course of trying to collect on training that was going on up at Grayling,” he said. “And it was through those channels that ultimately fed back to an FBI investigation that identified them by name and then worked through the legal system to put warrants out for them.”
Incidents like those at Camp Grayling aren’t unique to Michigan. In 2021, UM students from China were caught photographing military and naval infrastructure at Naval Air Station Key West in Florida. They were convicted of illegally photographing military installations and sentenced to prison, federal records show.
“This is not unusual. It’s happening everywhere,” Rogers said of the Camp Grayling incident. “And I think folks would probably be a little shocked to see how frequently that’s going on.”
The Camp Grayling incident is one of four federal cases since October 2024 involving UM students from China. Experts have told MLive that there’s a “pattern emerging” with these UM cases.
On Oct. 27, 2024, UM student Haoxiang Gao cast a ballot at an early voting site in Ann Arbor days before the November general election despite not being a U.S. citizen. Gao left the country and faces additional federal charges for fleeing the U.S. to avoid prosecution.
In June of this year, authorities unsealed a federal criminal complaint against UM doctoral student Yunqing Jian and her boyfriend Zunyong Liu.
They are accused of conspiring to defraud the United States and smuggling a fungal pathogen called Fusarium graminearum into the country. The pathogen causes rot and “head blight” to cereal crops. It is considered an agroterrorism weapon, according to the journal Food Security.
Also in June, a doctoral student at a Wuhan university was arrested in Michigan and charged with allegedly smuggling goods into the U.S. and making false statements.
That doctoral student, Chengxuan Han, is accused of sending four packages from China to the U.S. that contained nematode growth medium, or NGM.
NGM is a nutrient-rich, agar-based material used to cultivate nematode worms in petri dishes. Nematodes are a kind of roundworm. The packages, according to the complaint, were addressed to people associated with a UM lab.
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