A Chinese state-owned ship-building company has converted a bulk carrier into a floating farm that will produce 2,800 tons of fish a year.
The 225-meter-long Zhe Dai Yu Yang 60001 is part of a "marine bread basket" project that "aims to boost the nation's food security by repurposing old vessels for use in aquaculture." Chinese Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping is mobilizing state entities, including, in this case, China State Shipbuilding Corp., in his all-of-society effort to achieve food security.
Why should anyone outside China care about Xi's obsessive drive? Because this effort is another signal that he is preparing to attack.
Building mobile fish farms is not Xi's only initiative. His regime, beginning about two years ago, began a nationwide program to cut down forests to increase farmland acreage. The plan was a reversal of previous policies that, at great effort and expense, had turned farmland into forests.
Moreover, other land is being repurposed. The Rural Comprehensive Administrative Law Enforcement Brigade, nicknamed the nongguan or "rural managers," has been uprooting cash crops — tobacco, pepper and ginger plants — as well as cutting down bamboo groves and ripping up vineyards. In Chengdu, the government converted a portion of its belt of parks, created between 2003 and 2017 at a cost of more than $4 billion, into farms. Lawns of a residential complex in that metropolis are now growing wheat and corn. In other locations, officials have been using chainsaws to cut down fruit trees, filling in fish ponds, and confiscating poultry.
Xi has been urging the Chinese to leave cities and return to farming, and, in a replay of the Cultural Revolution, he is sending college graduates to work the soil.
Xi is emulating Mao Zedong, who infamously demanded that China's peasants "grow grain everywhere." Moreover, the government is serious about storing its crops. In March, the central government increased its agriculture stockpiling budget to $18.1 billion for grains and edible oils, a 6.1% increase over last year.
There is one more element to Xi's food plan: Attack American agriculture. In June, three Chinese nationals were charged with attempting to smuggle biological agents into the United States.
One of them, Yunqing Jian was arrested for trying to bring in Fusarium graminearum, a "potential agroterrorism weapon" that causes "head blight." This fungal disease hits wheat, barley, maize and rice, and "is responsible for billions of dollars in economic losses worldwide each year." In humans and livestock, head blight causes vomiting, liver damage and reproductive defects. The actions of these Chinese researchers, according to U.S. Attorney Jerome Gorgon, Jr., represented "the gravest national security concerns."
"Fusarium graminearum is a common pathogen affecting crops in China, and numerous Chinese research institutes, including the Institute of Rice Biology at Zhejiang University, have been actively studying it," Sean Lin, a former lab director of the viral disease branch of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, told me. "The FBI confiscated samples labeled 'ARP9,' an actin-related gene known to influence chromatin remodeling and gene transcription. This suggests the samples were genetically modified strains of Fusarium graminearum."
"This raises a critical biosafety question," Lin noted. "Were these modified strains designed to enhance infectivity or pesticide resistance?"
The answer is almost certainly "yes." Zunyong Liu, one of the three charged last month, was affiliated with Zhejiang University, where he conducted research on the same fungus. That institution, Lin says, has a well-documented collaboration with the People's Liberation Army. As he points out, "China's military-civil fusion strategy makes it reasonable to speculate about military interest in these genetically modified pathogens, which are potentially related to biological warfare or agroterrorism."
That these Chinese researchers would risk their careers by smuggling a known pathogen is a factor suggesting malign intent, especially given their relations with the Communist Party — Jian is a member — and their probable connections with military research in China.
The Chinese attempts this year to smuggle pathogens may be only the latest incidents in a Chinese campaign to bring down American agriculture. China's regime, it appears, has been trying to plant invasive species in America since at least 2020. That year, Americans in all 50 states received seeds, unsolicited, from China. Early this year, Temu, the online Chinese retailer, was caught sending seeds to the U.S., unsolicited. In one case, a Chinese party sent, unsolicited, both seeds and an unidentified liquid.
What's the context for all these developments?
"The increased measures to safeguard food security underscore Beijing's efforts to prepare for a long trade war with the U.S. and increasingly complex geopolitical challenges," writes Reuters, paraphrasing Genevieve Donnellon-May of Oxford Global Security.
That is a relatively benign explanation for something ominous. Xi Jinping cannot stop talking about fighting, and has been readying both the military and civilian society for conflict. Xi, in short, appears to be stockpiling grain in preparation for war.
To wage that war, Xi knows he must be able to feed 1.4 billion people, perhaps while his country is under embargo. China's food security law, which went into effect in 2024, aims for "absolute self-sufficiency."
China, which scores high in country rankings of self-sufficiency, is, in reality, not food secure. It is, after all, the world's largest food importer. Last year, it imported 157 million metric tons of grains and soybeans. The country buys about 80% of its soybean requirements from outside its borders.
Despite Xi's efforts, his country will remain dependent on others for foodstuffs. "What lands are suitable to grow foods are producing far too little of it, and much of the food is produced from a polluted soil and water base," Gregory Copley, the president of the International Strategic Studies Association, told me in 2021.
"The essential strategic basic characteristic of every enduring great power is its ability to feed itself, to be a net exporter of food," said Copley, also the editor-in-chief of Defense & Foreign Affairs Strategic Policy. "It is difficult to see how China can remediate its soils and its food production — or deliver enough potable water — to meet demands any time in the coming decade, even with a declining population."
Xi knows China cannot become self-sufficient, so he is, from all indications, making sure America is not either.
Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China's Project to Destroy America, a Gatestone Institute distinguished senior fellow, and a member of its Advisory Board.
Marilynne L. Mellander