Five Chinese nationals were indicted on federal charges on Wednesday for conspiracy, lying to federal investigators, and destroying records pertaining to their strange midnight visit to a Michigan Army National Guard base in August 2023.
The defendants, who were University of Michigan students at the time, were caught with cameras near a major National Guard live-fire training exercise at Camp Grayling. The exercise, dubbed “Northern Strike,” involved military vehicles and classified communications equipment. Visiting personnel from Taiwan were involved in the drills.
The indictment filed on Wednesday did not pertain to the suspicious activities of the students near the military base, but rather to the false statements they gave investigators. When they were approached by a National Guard officer after bypassing abundant caution tape and “no trespassing” signs to enter the Northern Strike area, the five Chinese nationals falsely claimed to be members of the media, then fled the area.
Local law enforcement soon discovered the five had booked themselves into a motel in Grayling, seemingly for the purpose of observing the military exercise.
One of the students, 23-year-old Renxiang Guan, changed his story after he was detained at Detroit Metropolitan Airport while attempting to travel to Shanghai a few months later. Guan reportedly claimed the five were “stargazing,” but two photos of military vehicles taken on the day of their visit to Camp Grayling were found in his personal electronics.
The other four students – Zhekhai Xu, 22; Haoming Zhu, 21; Jingzhe Tao, 22; and Yi Liang, 23 – were questioned by the FBI three months later, when they flew into Chicago O’Hare International Airport from Iceland.
The quartet gave inconsistent statements to FBI investigators, including implausible claims of visiting the Camp Grayling to watch a meteor shower on a rainy, overcast night. They also gave conflicting statements about whether they knew they were near a military base, and made false statements about when they booked their motel room.
The FBI also discovered WeChat messages in which the defendants admitted to deleting photos from their cameras and phones, and using third parties to carry their electronics on their trip to Iceland so they could avoid searches.
“The subjects discussed their encounter with the (sergeant major) at Bear Lake, attempted to coordinate their accounts of what happened so that the stories would match if any of them were questioned in the future and deleted potentially incriminating photos from their phones and cameras to preclude law enforcement from finding them,” the criminal complaint against the five Chinese students said.
The complaint referred to other instances of Chinese students performing what appeared to be surveillance of sensitive American facilities, including two other University of Michigan students who were caught snapping photos at Florida’s Naval Air Station Key West in 2020.
The two Chinese nationals in the Key West case wound up serving prison time, but the indictment against the five students on Wednesday indicated they attended the University of Michigan as part of a two-year joint program with Shanghai Jiao Tong University and left the country in May 2024 after it was completed. None of the five are currently in custody.
“Should they come into contact with US authorities, they will be arrested and face these charges,” Gina Balaya, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Detroit, said on Wednesday.