Oct 2: FBI charged five
nationals Zhekai Xu, Renxiang Guan, Haoming Zhu, Jingzhe Tao and Yi Liang — who were previously University of Michigan undergraduate engineering students from China — with crimes including conspiracy, lying to federal investigators and destroying records during a federal investigation, (more than a year) after they were found with cameras near numerous military vehicles, tents, and classified communications equipment at Camp Grayling, a 147,000-acre military training facility controlled by the Michigan Army National Guard, during the Northern Strike training exercise with members of the Taiwanese military after 12:30am on Aug 13, 2023.
(Northern Strike is one of the largest US National Guard training exercises in the US.)
The five
nationals were students at U-M in a joint program with
Shanghai Jiao Tong University. They arrived in the US for the two-year program and left after graduating in May 2024. However, Renxiang Guan is described as a current PhD student on the website of the Welch Lab at UM (welch-lab.github.io/team/) whereas Haoming Zhu indicates he’s going for a Master’s degree at Harvard on his LinkedIn profile. Maybe they’ve both changed their plans now!
Zhekai Xu is purportedly in Singapore. There’s not much publicly available information about Jingzhe Tao.
news article (paywalled)
detroitnews.com/story/news/loc
archived page
archive.ph/5AVH9
the names of the five
nationals appear in UM’s honors convocation in Mar 2024
honors.umich.edu/pdf/HonorsProg
all five appeared in the 2023 Dean’s Honor List
studentawards.engin.umich.edu/wp-content/upl