(The Epoch Times)—Two foreign nationals indicted by a grand jury on charges of violating the U.S. Arms Export Controls Act had direct communications with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials and intended to help enable the Chinese regime “reverse engineer” defense technology, according to court documents.
The Justice Department announced charges against John Miller, a UK citizen and U.S. lawful permanent resident, and Cui Guanghai, a Chinese citizen, on May 30.
Separate grand juries in California and Wisconsin returned indictments charging the men with stalking and harassing a Chinese pro-democracy activist and seeking to export arms for the benefit of the Chinese regime, respectively.
Cui and Miller were both arrested in April by Serbian authorities at the request of U.S. law enforcement, who are now seeking their extradition.
‘Wish List’
According to the Milwaukee indictment, Cui and Miller put together a “Christmas wish list” of defense technology in November and December 2023 that included cryptographic devices, hardware, radar, night vision goggles, “the armored plates [that] go on armored vehicles and tanks that the Yanks have,” military jet engines, handheld GPS units used by foot soldiers, and others.
By early 2024, Miller and Cui formed a group chat with an individual they enlisted to procure these items, and Miller had written that “they want a couple of each” to be able to “reverse engineer” the technology, the indictment states.
Miller relayed to this individual that the Chinese regime was willing to pay double or triple for these items, according to the indictment.
“They want the complete list but bear in mind this is just the top items, their list has hundreds of items, too many to list but I’m [sic] reality they are looking for almost anything they can get their hands on,” Miller sent in one message, according to the indictment. “Their pockets on this are very deep, it’s the holy grail for us if we can facilitate.”
“For the newest stinger they’re offering 50,000 USD,” reads one message noted in court documents. Another offered $200,000 for a set of black bee drones, $900,000 for an AGM-88E anti-radiation missile, and $2 million for an AN-MPQ-64 air defense radar. Cui allegedly wrote in messages that the Chinese buyer also wanted software and intelligence information, things that “will be easy to handover.” He reiterated in various messages that the requests he conveyed were on behalf of his buyer, the indictment states.
In March, the individual sent Cui a photo of a cryptographic device, and Cui said his contact was interested if they could also obtain the keys, court documents states.
“They were asking if those equipment have the keys. I think those keys issued by the military … it’s a kind of code to connect the GPS and the satellite,” Cui wrote, according to the court documents. “If the equipment with the encryption keys, my guys are very interested … The equipment worth good money money [sic] with the keys.” They then allegedly discussed transferring a payment.
In a separate video call between the two defendants and two individuals, Cui inquired after other encryption keys, explaining that “China is not an ally of NATO” or the United States, so this technology was usually hard to ship there, according to the indictment.
He allegedly said it was “impossible for anyone in China to get that stuff.” They discussed hiding the device inside a computer, among car parts, or inside a blender to ship to Hong Kong in order to get it into China, the indictment alleges.
The defendants do not have any lawyers listed in the court documents, and The Epoch Times has attempted to reach Serbian authorities for more information.
Transnational Repression
A separate court document filed in April detailed Cui and Miller’s relationship with CCP officials.
According to an affidavit declared by an FBI special agent, Miller had gone to Beijing and Liaoning to meet with officials in June 2023, including someone he said was the governor of Liaoning Province in China, a “main” contact that he claimed reported to people higher up in the CCP, and two higher level officials.
The affidavit notes that Miller claimed that he had been “promoted” during the June 2023 trip, during which he was asked to outline “all his capabilities and work to date, which Miller stated amounted to 35 pages.”
FBI agents in Milwaukee notified their Los Angeles counterparts in October 2023 when Cui and Miller engaged an individual to harass a China democracy activist and try to prevent them from protesting CCP leader Xi Jinping’s visit to San Francisco for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in November 2023.
A grand jury in California charged Cui and Miller with interstate stalking and conspiracy, alleging the two men plotted enlisted others to surveil the victim, install a tracking device in the victim’s car, slash their tires, and destroy a pair of statues the victim had made of Xi and Xi’s wife.
The statues showed Xi and his wife kneeling and shirtless, and the intended victim had put up a picture on social media with the statues in a large, Times Square advertisement.
The individual Cui and Miller had enlisted to harass the intended victim was an FBI source, who recorded the phone calls with the defendants, court documents show. According to a transcript of one call, the individual suggested the plan to put the intended victim in a wheelchair was “overkill.”
“Like the guy put statues and protested. You know what I mean?” he said, according to the documents.
Miller allegedly said he agreed, but “it’s all about what the big fella wants. It’s all about face.”
In one call, Miller said his superior wanted the victim surveilled for months, and Xi’s visit was incidental, the court documents show. “Xi just happens to be coming. The boss is coming that’s it. Apart from that they want to try to get something on him, they want to know what he’s doing. You know?” he said.
Miller enlisted the individual to assault the victim, discussing use of bullets, a baseball bat, or an ice pick “on the knees and ankles” and photographing the victim after, according to the DOJ. He and the individual referred to the Liaoning Province official as “second in command.”
“It’s gotta be sanctioned by somebody,” Miller said in one phone call, according to the court documents “Probably somebody from Beijing. The big boss.”
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
