The FBI came for Haitao Xiang on November 18, 2019—a Monday morning. Just two agents, no SWAT team. They steered into his subdivision, a lacework of tree-lined roads behind the Chesterfield Commons retail strip, then passed some brick-and-vinyl houses before stopping at Xiang’s. The agents stepped up to his front door. When he opened it, he was still in pajamas and looked surprised, says Lesley Edge, who supervises the counterintelligence squad of the FBI’s St. Louis Office. (She wasn’t present that morning but was briefed in detail afterward.) Xiang’s wife, Jin Zhu, and their 11-year-old daughter were also inside the house, so the agents asked whether he’d like to go elsewhere to speak in private. He agreed, got dressed, and they went for coffee. The agents hoped to fill a few gaps in their knowledge. They already knew, however, how the conversation would end. And time was tight; he was booked on a flight to China the next day.
At the time, Xiang had two jobs in his native China. He ran an agricultural research lab at the Nanjing Institute of Soil Science, which was sponsored and overseen by the Chinese government. He also served as CEO of Shuxi, a “smart farming” startup. He was now spending most of his time in Nanjing, rushing back to Chesterfield whenever possible to see his family. A slender 42-year-old with glasses and a “naturally gentle and soothing demeanor,” as one friend put it, Xiang was known as a husband who’d handle all household chores in order to help Zhu, a frequent sufferer of back pain; as a dad who’d taxi his daughter to piano and dance lessons; and as a gifted, diligent scientist who’d spend long, solitary hours in front of his laptop screen.
But the FBI agents were keenly interested in what Xiang had done years earlier, while working for his previous employer: the agro-giant Monsanto. He’d been a scientist there from 2008–2017, and the agents were convinced that, on his way out the door, Xiang had committed economic espionage—that is, had stolen trade secrets to benefit a foreign government (in this case, the party-state of the People’s Republic of China).
After a brief chat at the café, the agents put Xiang in handcuffs and took him into custody. Fewer than 50 defendants nationwide had ever faced the charge of economic espionage; no one in the Eastern District of Missouri had.
“I think he was pretty shocked,” says Edge. “He just never thought it was going to end with his arrest.”
If Xiang was surprised, he wasn’t alone. A former colleague who spoke on condition of anonymity says: “After this came out, I met up with people on the team who knew him, and everyone wonders how this could happen—it’s disbelief. There has to be a hidden part of this story.”
Mark Harris
Xiang’s mind has become, to outsiders, a shadow in a locked box: Known among loved ones as a quiet introvert, he’s sitting in a cell in Kentucky right now, detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He’s blocked from receiving any direct interview requests, and neither his wife nor his lawyer showed interest in helping SLM set up a call—or in commenting themselves.
But glints of his personality can be seen in his lawyer’s court filings, which contained 10 letters that Xiang’s friends and family wrote to the judge on his behalf. Together they tell of a childhood in Nanjing so poor that Xiang had to wear his sister’s hand-me-downs. Of a small apartment shared with grandparents. Of a strict, “abusive” father who demanded that his son excel at school and become a breadwinner. Of a boy who was “never physically strong” yet exceptionally bright, who enrolled at Nanjing Forestry University and would bike across town to a hospital to care for his mother after she broke her hip, then study late into the night. One fellow student recalled witnessing homesick dormmates from far-flung locales in China encircle Xiang when he’d return from a family weekend bearing containers of home-cooked food for his comrades to eat.
Xiang also showed a knack for computers and helped peers fix their fritzy hardware. One such peer was Zhu. They began dating and eventually got married, but unlike Xiang, she had dreams across the ocean: She was accepted into a Ph.D. program at the University of Illinois. On the day in 2002 that she departed for the U.S., her family saw her off at the bus station, and her brother noted how Xiang “cried but tried not to be noticed.”
Xiang soon scored his own visa and followed Zhu to Champaign–Urbana, where he studied under Lei Tian, associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering. The young man grew fascinated by the idea that remote sensors placed in crop fields could send farmers the hyperlocal data they’d need to add just the right amount of inputs (fertilizer, water) at just the right time—an endeavor known as “precision agriculture.”
“Haitao was one of my most authentic students in my career,” says Tian, adding that Xiang worked on not one but two remote-sensing projects that Tian deemed worthy of a doctorate: The first involved a camera atop a high tower, and the second, a camera on a remote-controlled helicopter. (This was before the ubiquity of drones.) That latter project led to an article, co-published with Tian in a refereed journal, that has been cited more than 560 times—a number that impresses J. Alex Thomasson, who heads Mississippi State University’s ag-and-bio-engineering department. “That’s a lot,” he says. “They were ahead of the game on that.”
The fact that Xiang graduated in 2008 and then landed a job at Monsanto as a research applications engineer doesn’t surprise Thomasson, who also serves as president-elect of the nonprofit Council for Agricultural Science and Technology. “I’ve found that most of those corporate jobs are filled by internationals,” he says. “It’s not that companies aren’t looking for U.S. citizens; it’s that there just aren’t many U.S. citizens with Ph.D.s in some of these very specific STEM fields.” National Science Board stats show, for example, that in the year Xiang graduated, roughly 60 percent of all engineering doctorates awarded by American universities went to temporary visa holders.
And why not hire an applicant as promising as Xiang? Even if, in the context of the U.S.-China strategic rivalry, his national origin had given his employers at Monsanto pause, they would’ve been barred by federal law from discriminating against him on that basis. But Monsanto didn’t seem China-averse in those years. It was actively forging links to that country by investing, for example, in a joint venture with China National Seed Group and in research collaborations at universities in Wuhan and Beijing. (Monsanto has since been acquired by Bayer; the company’s external communications team declined all interview requests.)
The party-state rulers in China, for their part, also wanted such “international cooperation” and said so in their ambitious plan, made public in 2006, to foster an “innovative culture” by 2020 and to be a world leader in science and technology by 2050. The plan professed respect for intellectual property rights. It clarified, however, the central goal: “indigenous innovation,” which meant Chinese “assimilation, absorption, and re-innovation” of imported technology. And that, according to a 2010 report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, sounded to some Western companies like a “blueprint for technology theft on a scale the world has never seen before.” The cover of Bloomberg BusinessWeek in March 2012 captured the ethos in its headline: “Hey China! Stop Stealing Our Stuff.”
The FBI was paying attention, too. During the first term of the Obama administration, it set up a unit to counter economic espionage. Within a few years, it had surveyed 165 companies and found that half reported being victims, nearly all by actors with connections to China. As cases spiked, the bureau announced an awareness campaign in 2015. Agents fanned out from the field offices to get in front of American business execs and their security personnel and warn them of the risks. In St. Louis, that task fell to special agent Jaret Depke. And Depke soon had a case to look into—at Monsanto.
Jiunn-ren Chen, an employee at one of Monsanto’s subsidiaries, had secretly accepted a job at China National Seed, according to a forfeiture action filed by the U.S. Attorney. In June 2016, the complaint says, Chen gave notice of his resignation, then proceeded to download a batch of 63 files containing company trade secrets and tried to cover his digital tracks. He later bought one-way plane tickets to China for himself and his family, and they flew out the next day. Chen was never charged. But Monsanto knew an FBI agent to call if anything else came up.
A year later, something did. Monsanto called Depke about another employee who was resigning: Haitao Xiang.
By this time, Xiang had not only settled in Chesterfield with his wife and daughter but also had shifted jobs. He now worked as an advanced imaging scientist for The Climate Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of Monsanto—the same place where Chen had worked.
A former colleague remembers Xiang as “absolutely brilliant” and “a good person” whom the team loved working with. “He wasn’t a sneaky guy,” the colleague continues. “You know how with some people, you’re like, ‘Ehh, he’s kinda iffy’? [Xiang] is not that person.”
In May 2017, Xiang gave two weeks’ notice. His explanation: He intended to join a tiny ag-remote-sensing startup that his onetime thesis advisor, Tian, was trying to get off the ground. (The startup, called AG-Sensus, had just received a federal small-business grant of $150,000; Tian confirms that, at one point, he’d invited Xiang to come onboard.)
Monsanto security specialists scoured Xiang’s web activity and found a reason for concern. On a particular evening the year before, they saw, he had typed some phrases into Google as if trying to figure out the correct way to express something:
as evidence to accuse me
company information to the third party
can use it to against me in the future
I don’t want it to be
to be a piece of evidence that
Xiang sat down on Monsanto’s campus for an exit interview on June 9, 2017. His interviewers asked: Have you saved any Monsanto IP onto personal devices or in private cloud storage? He said no. Have you shared it with any unauthorized people? He said no. Then they asked him to sign a termination agreement and confronted him with his Google searches. That’s when, according to Monsanto’s statements to investigators, Xiang started sweating and appeared “extremely nervous” and “blatantly deceptive.” They relayed this to Depke.
Depke, who’d been receiving updates from Monsanto, had suspicions. What he didn’t have yet was a warrant—though not for lack of trying. (In national security matters, he’d later testify, procuring a warrant takes longer.)
Yet there was a way to investigate Xiang further. Depke had called Art Beck, a Customs and Border Protection officer who worked in the FBI’s counterintelligence squad. Depke got his colleague up to speed, and Beck, in turn, told the agent something he hadn’t known about “the border search exception.” That term refers to the CBP’s ability to legally seize someone’s belongings at the U.S. border without a warrant. Beck informed Depke that it extends to a person’s electronic devices. This piqued Depke’s interest. Beck went into the CBP’s system and put a “lookout” on Xiang—in essence, asking to be notified of any imminent travel. Swiftly, a notification came back: Xiang was about to leave the country, without his family, on a one-way ticket to China.
Xiang left his exit interview on Monsanto’s campus. In the late afternoon, he rented a Hyundai Accent near Spirit of St. Louis Airport. At some point over the next 15 hours, he drove that car to O’Hare International Airport and dropped it off. He then passed through airport security and tried to board an 7:50 a.m. flight to Toronto in order to connect to a second flight to Shanghai.
But while on the jetway, he was stopped by CBP officers. (The lookout had included a secondary inspection.) They opened and sifted through all his luggage. In total, they seized six objects, including a micro SD card. The officers then allowed Xiang to walk onto the plane and leave the U.S.
The officers later FedEx-ed these seized objects to the FBI in St. Louis. Depke looked at a forensic image of the micro SD card. With some keyword searches, he discovered a set of documents marked as confidential, proprietary, or trade secrets. These files had been saved onto the card between 1:18 a.m. and 1:40 a.m. on June 10—just hours before Xiang’s flight out of O’Hare. The agent printed them out and hand-delivered them to Monsanto’s security personnel. “They were highly concerned,” he would later tell the court.
Within a week, Monsanto confirmed: These were indeed trade secrets. And Xiang wasn’t supposed to have them. The FBI secured a warrant for the devices they’d already gathered.
They later got a warrant to search the contents of Xiang’s personal Gmail account. And that’s when a fuller picture came into view.
On November 1, 2018, the DOJ issued a fact sheet to describe an aggressive new push: The China Initiative. “No country presents a broader, more severe threat to our ideas, our innovation, and our economic security than China,” FBI director Christopher Wray said in the document, which laid out a 10-prong plan. The first priority was to prosecute trade-secret thieves. The second was to figure out a way to deal with “non-traditional collectors,” defined as “researchers in labs, universities, and the defense industrial base” who “are being co-opted into transferring technology contrary to U.S. interests.” Here Wray was alluding to the distrust felt by many in Washington toward China’s talent recruitment plans. Believed to now number more than 200, these programs, which are controlled by the PRC party-state, share a common goal: to compensate for the historical tendency of Chinese scientists to study overseas and then stay there—exactly as Xiang and his wife had done.
The idea is to turn China’s brain drain into a brain gain: Approach scientists and academics outside China and offer them salaries, research funding, lab space, or other inducements in exchange for their know-how, technology, and intellectual work—without requiring them, in many cases, to spend much time in China. Critics allege that this intellectual work may or may not add to humanity’s body of knowledge but always benefits China, and that the talent plans incentivize theft. The PRC party-state has insisted that it opposes ethical breaches and considers them a bug, not a feature, of its programs. Whatever the case, one program, the Hundred Talents Plan, is described on the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ website as “a major project…recruiting talents overseas” that seeks, among other candidates, “outstanding engineers and technicians.” And court records reveal that in 2015, while Xiang was working for The Climate Corporation at Monsanto, he took an interest in it.
“Attached is my latest resume in English,” he wrote from his work email on June 2 of that year to an HTP recruiter at the Nanjing Institute of Soil Science. “Please review it when you have time and see if it is possible to recruit me to work at your Institute.” The response came back nine days later: “Regarding the talent recruitment under the Hundred Talents Program, I have reported to the leaders of the Institute…[they] indicated that they wanted to meet with you in person if the opportunity arises…”
Xiang did end up meeting with them during a trip to China in April 2016. But before doing so, he’d emailed a scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who had agreed to sign a letter of recommendation. Xiang described how he wanted the letter to look: “I prefer not to include the details of my work at Monsanto since the document will be shared on line [sic]. I don’t want it to be a piece of evidence that could be potentially used against me by Monsanto.” This seems to explain Xiang’s Google searches that Monsanto had flagged as suspicious.
But why did Xiang fear his employer?
Monsanto had acquired The Climate Corporation, the brainchild of two Google employees, for about $1 billion. Its claim to fame was FieldView, a precision-ag platform that it marketed and sold to farmers. The component that the company considered most valuable generated advice to farmers on how much nitrogen to add to their fields. The blueprint for that component was referred to in court records as the Nutrient Optimizer, an 86-page PDF full of highly technical details. The company would later tell investigators that the research represented there “took thousands of hours over numerous years and hundreds of millions of dollars to develop” and that “somebody with Xiang’s knowledge could take [it] and have a significant head start in creating a company equivalent to TCC without having to do any of the research.”
Xiang downloaded the Nutrient Optimizer from the company’s file system to his company laptop in February 2016, investigators learned. More than a year later, he tried to leave the country with a copy of it on his SD card, but that card was seized by the CBP at O’Hare.
So was a theft thwarted? The lead prosecutor in this case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Matt Drake, has doubts. “I think it would’ve been naive for us to assume he had only one copy,” says Drake, adding that Xiang may have hid a copy in some other digital location. “We searched his Gmail account, and we didn’t find evidence of that, but maybe he had other email accounts we didn’t know about.”
One irony of Xiang’s situation, according to Tian at the University of Illinois, is that precision-ag still has a long way to go, so stealing any related tech would be of questionable value. “I told the FBI very clearly there is no technology to steal from because Monsanto hadn’t figured it out yet,” says Tian. (Court records show that the company considers the Nutrient Optimizer “highly valuable” and proprietary.) Thomasson understands Tian’s skepticism. “I probably have similar reservations about what these products can do,” he says. “It’s debatable what the utility is, but they’re the property of these companies, and there’s a market for it.”
The Hundred Talents Plan approved Xiang’s application. He was told to report to work on June 12, 2017—two days after his flight out of O’Hare. The official descriptions of his work at the Nanjing Institute and at a new company he founded, Shuxi, closely resembled the goals and work of The Climate Corporation, according to government filings.
Over the next two years—while the FBI was investigating and getting warrants—Xiang made multiple trips back to St. Louis. “Every time,” his wife would later recall in a letter to the judge, “he would stuff his suitcases with toys, clothes, and books he knew our daughter and I would enjoy.” In November 2019, he flew in just to drive them down to Springfield, Missouri, for a statewide piano competition that his daughter was performing in. “I asked him not to because of the expense and time and all the hassles he had to deal with, but he insisted,” Zhu wrote. “He was worried that my back pain would make the long-distance driving very challenging, and he wanted to be there to cheer for my daughter.” In Springfield, their daughter played Mozart and Debussy and won her grade. “It was such a memorable trip filled with precious moments,” Zhu continued, “before the whole world turned upside down on November [18], 2019, when Haitao was arrested.”
The core claim of Xiang’s defense attorney, Vadim Glozman of Chicago, has been that the feds cut corners in going after his client. In Glozman’s view, the FBI didn’t have a warrant to search Xiang’s electronic devices, but rather than respect his constitutional right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure, they took a back-door approach by deputizing the CBP to do it as a border search on the jetway at O’Hare. “This case is about federal agents attempting to exploit a narrow warrant exception to skirt the Fourth Amendment,” Glozman has written in a brief submitted to the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (The DOJ disputes these claims and believes its methods were above board.) When the appeals judges hear the oral argument, they’ll be considering this issue for the first time.
But there’s no question that Xiang committed a crime. On January 6, 2022, he pleaded guilty to conspiracy to steal a trade secret—the Nutrient Optimizer—in order to benefit the PRC.
One mystery that looms is motive: Why did Xiang do this? Filial piety, argues Glozman in his sentencing brief. Xiang’s father had chronic lung disease, and his mother a permanent disability from her broken hip; they pressured him to return and care for them. “It was their position,” Glozman writes, “that because of the sacrifices they made to provide for his education, he owed it to them.” That wouldn’t explain, though, why Xiang chose this particular route.
Nor would that motive exclude additional ones. In the 2014 book Age of Ambition, Evan Osnos, now a staff writer for The New Yorker, observed that when he moved to China in 2005, the old stereotype of the Chinese as “collectivist, inscrutable drones” did no justice to what had become a nation of strivers. “Forty years ago the Chinese people had virtually no access to fortune, truth, or faith—three things denied them by politics and poverty,” he wrote. “They had no chance to build a business or indulge their desires, no power to challenge propaganda and censorship, no way to find moral inspiration outside the party. Within a generation, they had gained access to all three—and they want more.” Upon reading that passage, it’s tempting to look at Xiang’s profile picture on an archived version of Shuxi’s website—a picture showing the former poor kid from Nanjing now wearing a pinstriped suit and stylish glasses—and to detect in the smile on his lips a flicker of triumph.
But the FBI has a characteristically unromantic take. “When you boil it down, it’s theft,” says Mark Dargis, the assistant special agent in charge in St. Louis.
At one point, the DOJ presented this case as part of its China Initiative, but that bureaucratic entity no longer exists. Toward the end of the Trump administration, prosecutors went after academics who had participated in talent programs but hadn’t followed transparency rules—for example, by failing to disclose their financial gains to the Internal Revenue Service or to federal agencies that award research grants. The MIT Technology Review found in late 2021 that “a significant number” of those cases had fallen apart, and overall, the DOJ had no clear criteria for lumping a case into the initiative but did show a clear pattern in whom it targeted: 90 percent of defendants were of Chinese heritage. Advocacy groups, lawmakers, and thousands of professors accused the government of racial profiling and called for the program’s termination. They got their wish in February, when the Biden administration completed an internal review and opted for a “new approach.”
But while the DOJ promised to better distinguish between the PRC party-state and people of Chinese descent, it did not downgrade its assessment of the problem. “The Chinese government poses an even more serious threat to Western businesses than even many sophisticated businesspeople realize,” Wray said during a speech in July.
So what’s the scale and scope of that threat? “You can’t empirically answer that question,” says Jeff Stoff, a former analyst for the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal agencies. Tallying up the DOJ’s prosecutions makes for a faulty metric, Stoff argues, first because it doesn’t capture methods—such as talent programs—that are “left of theft” (meaning not technically illegal). But second, economic espionage is hard to prove, and companies don’t always acknowledge it for fear that doing so may hurt their reputation or share price. “They don’t want to air their dirty laundry and let everybody know they had their IP taken,” says Stoff. (SLM contacted more than a dozen prominent companies and business groups in the region to gauge their level of concern about economic espionage. Most didn’t respond, and the ones that did declined an interview.)
Dargis says that, according to the charts and graphs he’s seen, cooperating with the FBI doesn’t usually trigger those adverse effects on a business. What’s more, he says, the Xiang case seems to have nudged certain large corporations to engage with the bureau. Some came forward with specific situations. Others merely built lines of communication. But Dargis emphasizes: The bureau urges companies to focus on employees’ behaviors, not their DNA or birthplace. “We do not target someone for investigation just because of their nationality,” he says.
Even so, the U.S. can’t prosecute its way out of this problem, says Anna Puglisi, senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. What’s needed, she argues, is a comprehensive strategy, because China—an “ever more authoritarian” nation-state that flouts global norms of science and commerce—clearly has its own. “The United States has in many ways lost the PR war with China by not talking about the structural differences in our systems,” said Puglisi in a Senate hearing in 2021, “and instead focusing on individual instances of bad behavior that can seem anecdotal.”
In Xiang’s case, the judge decided on April 7 to fine him $150,000 and give him a prison term of 29 months. Because Xiang had already served that much time on his federal charge, he was given credit for it, so his sentence was mostly finished. It’s unclear why he remains in ICE custody seven months later; neither Glozman nor the DOJ nor ICE would address it directly. China’s embassy in Washington, D.C., declined to comment.
Xiang was given a chance to speak at the hearing on April 7. In halting sentences, he said: “In particular, the first thing I want to apologize is to Monsanto and to the Climate Corporation. I am extremely sorry to them. I’m not a bad man, to forgive me. But most of all I want to apologize to the government and the court of this country. And last I want to apologize to my family, who[m] I disgraced. And, Your Honor, I’ve been fully surrendering myself to the experience during my incarceration. I’m not the same person anymore. I’ve truly learned my lesson, and the lesson has been deeply imbedded in my bone marrow. I have committed to the rest of my life to cleanse this thing of my myself, this stain on myself.”
Drake has observed that in every court appearance, Xiang wore a “blank” expression. “I wouldn’t use the word ‘stoic,’” says Drake. “Not ‘scared.’ Not ‘unhappy.’ Not ‘mad.’ Just emotionless and quiet. And respectful to the court.”
That claim is hard to verify. The hearing was held via video conference. The judge, interpreter, and attorneys could see Xiang’s face. To members of the public, though, whose only option was to call in and hear the audio, his face was invisible.
