The Scientist and the Spy

by Mara Hvistendahl

  Among the anointed leaders was DBN. Both DBN and Kings Nower received tax breaks, access to low-interest loans, and direct financial support from the Chinese government. They were known as dragon head enterprises—a notion taken from the dragon dance performed at the lunar new year, where one performer stands tall, wearing the head, while a row of others trails behind him, hunched down to play the body. Chinese companies are often rewarded for nationalism, and DBN’s clunky slogan read like it had been crafted with government interests in mind: SERVE THE COUNTRY TO HELP AGRICULTURE FLOURISH, STRIVE FOR NUMBER ONE, DEVELOP TOGETHER. Dr. Li talked about the need for a “national hero,” and he and other employees were open about their end goal: to use the foreigners’ technology to beat them at their own game. That DBN targeted genetically modified American seed lines meant that its executives foresaw a change in policy, and even that they might have inside information on when it could happen.

  * * *

  • • •

  PARTWAY THROUGH THEIR TOUR of the Midwest, Robert, Dr. Li, and Wang Lei stopped in Illinois to meet an American agronomist whom Robert hoped to hire to help with the U.S. seed project. Then Robert flew back to Florida. He wanted to spend more time with his family. Having known little beyond life in America, his children experienced few of the language and cultural stresses that he faced. But his daughter was entering adolescence, and his son was in elementary school, and they needed him around. His break was brief, though. Shortly after he arrived home, he was on the road again. He needed to take a quick trip to Beijing.

  EIGHT

  FALL 2011

  Kevin exited the plane with a gaggle of other passengers and made his way through the Beijing airport to the security exit, where an assistant from DBN greeted him. She was tall, with skin that looked like it did not see much sun. Her name was Mao Li. She introduced herself as Molly in excellent English.

  Mao Li led Kevin to a company car in a nearby lot, where a driver took his luggage. The journey into the city center followed a six-lane highway, and it lasted a small eternity. The thick haze that normally shrouded Beijing had lifted that day, but even so the city lacked a clear skyline and seemed to go on forever, a decentralized blob. Beijing’s roads are laid out like concentric rings on a target: first ring, second ring, third ring, fourth ring, all the way out to the eighth ring. The airport was just inside the sixth ring road. They had a ways to go.

  This trip to DBN’s headquarters was an afterthought. Kevin had been invited to China by Jilin Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Changchun, a city in the northeast. His flight returned through Beijing, and after the awkward dinner at the Roadhouse, he figured that stopping in at DBN might improve his chances of getting hired. When Robert learned about Kevin’s trip and extended the invitation, Kevin set aside a day for the meeting. Compared with Changchun, the capital felt fast-paced. The highway was clogged with swerving, honking cars. On the surrounding streets, small dramas unfolded as tempers flared and then died out. The air had a sickening aftertaste, of secondhand smoke mixed with cough syrup and car exhaust. Then there was the odor: metallic and acrid at the same time.

  They eventually cut west toward Zhongguancun, the area sometimes called China’s Silicon Valley. Kevin eyed office buildings of varying vintage, a few of them emblazoned with names like Lenovo and Baidu, but the neighborhood was no Palo Alto. The structures were caked with a layer of dust.

  When the car finally pulled into a U-shaped drive and stopped beneath a bizarre-looking high-rise, Kevin craned his neck to look up. It was as if a rectangular prism had been plopped on top of a futuristic Buddhist temple. At the very top of the building, mounted to the roof, were four dingy Chinese characters that he couldn’t read. Beneath them were block letters, originally white but now gray from smog: HUBEI HOTEL.

  Mao Li ushered him inside. In the center of the lobby, cordoned off with a red velvet rope, was a six-foot-tall chunk of carved lacquered wood. Scattered around the space were stiff armchairs in which the stuffing looked like an afterthought. Mao Li helped him check in, explaining that DBN would pick up the tab. He was pleased. Because he hadn’t yet signed a contract, he had expected to pay for his own lodging. This seemed like a good sign.

  His room was spare but clean. There were two double beds with crisp white sheets, and underneath the bedside table were two pairs of white disposable slippers. Facing the beds was a heavy desk and a counter that held heavy lidded mugs and bags of green tea. Kevin found a placard on the back of the door advertising a daily room rate of what worked out to be around $120. He considered this sum and decided that he must be at the Beijing equivalent of downtown Chicago’s Hyatt Regency, the hotel that hosted the American Seed Trade Association’s annual Seed Expo. He felt good. Robert had not flinched when Kevin quoted his rate. If all worked out, the gig would help him pay the bills, and then some. In the back of his mind, he harbored a more ambitious hope—that he could convince DBN to license some of the hybrids that he bred in his backyard.

  He left his bags in his room, and Mao Li took him to lunch. Being in China felt right to Kevin. Decades earlier, his father had been stationed on a minesweeper in Shanghai during World War II, and Kevin had always been curious about that period of his life. Partway through Bill Montgomery’s tour of the Pacific, he had planned to travel with his shipmates to Beijing to see the Forbidden City. The night before they left, the Communists captured a key railway line, rendering the journey impossible and dashing the American sailors’ plans. Now, Kevin hoped, he could complete the trip on his father’s behalf.

  After lunch, he asked to be driven to the imperial palace complex. As he passed street vendors selling trinkets and walked through the entrance gate to the Forbidden City, he took satisfaction in taking the steps that so many years ago his father could not. Once inside the complex, he marveled at a tilted stone sundial that told the time throughout the year, with the hours in winter signaled through a shadow cast on its underside. He reflected that life could be like that. How a situation looked could depend on where you stood. He wondered whether a new angle would give him insight into his relationship to DBN—whether now that he was in China he might finally understand what it was that Robert wanted him to do.

  * * *

  • • •

  AFTER BREAKFAST THE NEXT MORNING, Mao Li picked Kevin up in the DBN car and escorted him to the company’s headquarters. He looked out the window as the driver pulled in next to a run-down hospital. Zhongguan Tower was an aging office building with a curved façade covered by mirrored windows. DBN and Kings Nower shared an office on the fourteenth floor. For the base of a large agricultural company, the headquarters was unimpressive. Later, Kevin would learn that fourteen, yao si, was a homophone in Mandarin for “going to die.” Often, the fourteenth floors of Chinese buildings rent at a heavily discounted rate. At DBN, apparently, the bottom line trumped superstition.

  Someone showed him to the conference room. Kevin had prepared a short presentation on his breeding work, and he was setting up his laptop, struggling to plug it into an adapter that worked with Chinese outlets, when Robert appeared and greeted him warmly. Here was his ally, Kevin thought.

  After Kevin got done presenting, Robert explained how seed breeding fit into DBN’s larger business operations, boasting that in just a decade Kings Nower had become one of the largest seed companies in China. Kevin glanced at the seed catalog he’d been handed. It was thick and glossy, like the seed books published by American companies. Clearly a great deal of energy went into marketing DBN’s products.

  They spent the morning in the conference room as an assortment of people came and went. At one point Kevin recognized Dr. Li from the Texas Roadhouse. But Robert did most of the talking. By now Kevin was getting the sense that Robert liked to talk.

  At noon they broke for lunch. The group shuttled into an elevator and down to a restaurant on a lower floor of the building, where a waiter seated them around a large table in the co
rner. A gas fireplace was set into a nearby wall. Kevin got the impression that it was DBN’s regular spot. He took a seat between Robert and Mao Li. Across the table from him, with his back toward the fireplace, was a man with a square jaw and rectangular rimless glasses who seemed to command respect despite saying little. Someone introduced him as Shao Genhuo, DBN’s CEO.

  The group mostly talked in Chinese, and as the wait staff brought out dish after dish, Kevin caught only a few phrases in English. But it was clear that Shao was the center of attention. Even Robert seemed humbled by the presence of his brother-in-law.

  Kevin noted, with some disappointment, that the lunch was not about plant breeding. Most of the people at the table seemed to work in sales and marketing. He grew more hopeful that afternoon when he got in a car with Robert and a Kings Nower breeder and rode to DBN’s biotechnology facility, where the company’s experimental work on genetically modified seeds was done. The breeder mentioned that he had spent time in Iowa working for Pioneer. Kevin deduced that the man knew a lot about seed breeding, and he saw a potential ally. When they arrived at a brick building on the city’s outskirts, Robert escorted Kevin inside and said to the breeder pointedly in English, “Let him see whatever he wants.” Then he left.

  Kevin was confused. He was accustomed to seed companies maintaining a veil of secrecy over their operations. Secrecy, in fact, is critical to the intellectual property protection strategies of most American corporations. In order to claim that something is a trade secret, companies have to treat it as confidential. If they take out a patent, or give out blueprints to any employee who asks, the information in question is no longer protected. Companies sometimes wield trade secrets as weapons against competitors, but secrecy was seen as the best way to protect sensitive information, especially at the experimental stage.

  Kevin had a sense that the intellectual property situation in China was different—that the rapid scientific development on display in Zhongguancun had a dark side. Back in the 1980s, when a few fledging computer companies spun off from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and opened up shop along Zhongguancun’s Electronics Street, or Dianzi Jie, pirated software was so abundant that some preferred the moniker Pianzi Jie, or Crook Street.

  Years earlier, as a seed breeder at the Iowa company Garst, Kevin remembered fielding requests for proprietary inbreds from visiting delegations of Chinese seed scientists. The first time it happened, he was shocked that the breeders openly asked for information that people in the industry knew was closely held. By the time the third group arrived, he had come to expect the request. He always said no, but he suspected that the breeders found other ways to obtain proprietary seeds. But Robert had worked at U.S. universities, and the breeder who was escorting Kevin had worked for Pioneer. They should have understood these sensitivities better than anyone. What could DBN possibly gain from granting an American consultant unfettered access to its facilities?

  The lab was long and rectangular, the windows facing south to let in sunlight. Inside Kevin saw dozens of young people seated at long benches. Whether they were students or newly minted scientists he couldn’t discern. He immediately recognized the tasks they were performing, though: placing seeds in the germinator, putting plantlets into the growing medium, slicing off pieces of leaves. Lining the south end of the room were stainless-steel cabinets about the size of industrial walk-in refrigerators. Each growth chamber was calibrated to a specific humidity or temperature or light regime. As his host opened the doors to one, the lights inside cast an eerie glow. Kevin glimpsed small corn seedlings, lined up in neat rows.

  At the time, the setup seemed perfectly normal. Later Kevin would wonder if it had all been for show. But then he would remember the mortar and pestle for grinding up seed parts, the dissecting microscopes for examining seedlings, the polyacrylamide gels for running DNA sequences, the chemical storage cabinets, the centrifuges, the homogenizers. Kevin knew that China’s restrictions on selling genetically modified corn were expected to be lifted, and yet DBN seemed to be preparing for more than just selling transgenic corn in China. The researchers he talked with were also developing resistance to pesticides that killed insects found only outside Asia, suggesting that DBN had international ambitions. When he asked more about this aspect of their work, though, his host interjected in Mandarin. An awkward silence followed. So much for his new friend showing him everything.

  The next day, his last in China, Kevin visited the Great Wall. In the centuries since it was completed, the wall had come to stand as much for cultural segregation as for defense planning. The local seed industry had always struck him as similarly isolated. Weaving through the throngs of other tourists, he wondered if his meeting the day before meant that the sector was now opening up to the rest of the world. Or did DBN have some larger plan?

  NINE

  2015–2018

  In 2015, I moved with my husband and kids to Minneapolis, and we settled into a life strangely close to the one I’d had growing up. We traded out the sautéed meat and vegetable dishes we had eaten in China for chili and cornbread and attended barbecues where we ate corn on the cob. One of the first gifts my mother gave us for our new house was a set of corn skewers crowned with polka-dotted flip-flops.

  Now, I knew, I could chase the seed theft story in earnest. From information about the FBI investigation that had surfaced in court proceedings, I had the names of people who had interacted with Robert Mo at various points in his travels across the Midwest. I drove to Iowa and knocked on their doors. Like our new lifestyle, this reporting was weirdly familiar. My grandfather had been a journalism professor at Iowa State, and for a while my father was an agricultural reporter at a small-town newspaper in southern Minnesota. Traveling around the rural Midwest, I recognized scenes from my youth: brightly lit truck stops, county fairs staffed by carnies with faded tattoos, motels with ancient televisions and contemporary roaches. The small towns I visited seemed hollower and more decayed than I remembered. Adjusting for inflation, farm income in America had plummeted in the past three decades, and in many towns that shift was palpable. “There’s a feeling that we’re going into a farm crisis everywhere,” the food activist and farmer’s daughter Ash Bruxvoort told me over coffee in Des Moines.

  I was finally home, though. Like villagers in rural China, Midwesterners were warm and hospitable, but the difference was that they read me as one of them. When I knocked on doors, the farmers who opened them would often tell me they had nothing to say and then proceed to spend twenty minutes chatting. It was only when talk turned to China, or to ethnicity more generally, that the conversation sometimes grew strained.

  One day while I was retracing Robert’s steps in rural Iowa, a retired farmer invited me into his home and offered me a seat at his kitchen table. He told me he had gotten out of the farming business because he had trouble making a living as crop prices fell. He rented out his fields to his neighbors and spent the harvest holed up inside watching television, occasionally venturing out to check on the litter of kittens in his barn. I had a few names of people I wanted to contact, and he helpfully pulled out a dusty phone book and began paging through it in search of their details. Then before I left, he leaned in and told me that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had staged the Black Lives Matter protests as part of an effort to institute martial law. I blinked stupidly, bewildered that he could be so welcoming and so mistrustful at the same time. I mumbled an excuse and got up to leave.

  Many farmers rightly felt excluded from the economic gains brought by globalization, some of which had been made possible by their labor. They were hostage both to the whims of U.S. commodities traders and to orders from China—as was underscored in 2013, when the Chinese government rejected millions of tons of Syngenta corn at port because they contained an unapproved genetically modified variety. The move cost U.S. farmers billions of dollars, prompting them to bring a class-action suit against Syngenta. Sometimes, I wondered if this discontent was c
hanneled into something more visceral. When I asked people who had run into Robert or other DBN employees to describe them, they often looked at me quizzically, as if it were unfathomable that the men might possess traits besides their ethnicity. “Well, he looked like a Chinese man,” one farmer said of Robert. Others immediately went to epithets.

  After my visit with the retired farmer, I drove into town. The tallest building for miles was a towering grain elevator belonging to the Heartland Co-op. Kernels of corn spilled out the bottom of the structure, blanketing the surrounding parking lot in yellow dots.

  When I walked into the co-op’s office, a manager told me flat out that he had never seen the man I was tracking. He would remember if he had, he said, taking a sip of coffee from a Styrofoam cup. “A Chinaman in Redfield, Iowa, would stick out like a sore thumb.”

  * * *

  • • •

  BEING BORN A WHITE AMERICAN means being insulated from having to think much about either race or nationality. Until I moved to China at the age of twenty-four, I hadn’t grappled with either in a meaningful way. My eight years in China were my education. It was an incomplete one—white people occupy a position of privilege in China, and I did not live in the shadow of a long-standing history of discrimination and systemic inequality, as people of color do in the United States. But I learned how it felt to have my race and nationality overwhelm other aspects of who I am, and to be confused with other white people who looked nothing like me. As the years passed and I grew comfortable in my surroundings, I would often forget that I didn’t belong. Then I would run out to buy milk and notice a shopkeeper’s face screw up in confusion before I opened my mouth.