(Daily Signal)—Almost a year after the University of Michigan severed ties with a Chinese institution over concerns of national security, over a dozen U.S. universities are still working with Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Now, at least one of those schools is also considering cutting ties with the Chinese university over national security concerns.
The University of Hawaii at Manoa’s relationship with Shanghai Jiao Tong University is currently under review, the Honolulu public university told The Daily Signal.
The central fear is China may exploit its relationship with universities like Yale, Cornell, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the same way it is reported to have done at the University of Michigan, according to a Heritage Foundation expert.
In the case of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, “it would be safer” for U.S. universities “to cut ties at this particular juncture where we must pay closer attention to these critical matters to safeguard our national security from [Chinese Communist Party] threats,” Anthony Kim, a research fellow in international economic affairs at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal.
University of Michigan
In January, the University of Michigan announced it would end its longstanding partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, based in Shanghai, China, over Congress raising concerns of national security.
Following an extensive investigation into American universities’ relationship and work with China, Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., sent a letter to University of Michigan President Santa Ono at the end of October 2024, warning that “Sanghai Jiao Tong drives the [People’s Republic of China’s] military modernization and intelligence capabilities.”
Through its work and research, Sanghai Jiao Tong makes “significant contributions to the PRC’s most sensitive defense programs, including nuclear weapons, carrier rockets, satellites, nuclear submarines, and fighter jets,” the congressman wrote to Ono.
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A series of national security breaches at the University of Michigan were also discovered to be linked to the school’s research relationship with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, The Washington Free Beacon reports. The breaches included accusations that University of Michigan Students, who are Chinese nationals, took photos of military drills at Camp Grayling, a military training facility in Michigan.
Earlier this year, the Department of Justice charged a Chinese national employed at the University of Michigan with smuggling a dangerous biological pathogen called Fusarium graminearum into the U.S.
Change Is ‘Overdue’
“I think we need a common sense-based, step-by-step approach to untangle what’s been going on with bad, malicious players that have been polluting our academic institutions,” Kim said, adding that the change is “overdue.”
Changes aimed at “stopping academic or other types of espionage or influence operations, particularly from China’s CCP” should include “enforcing stricter transparency for funding …, lowering disclosure thresholds for university grants [and] donations, and holding universities accountable for concealing foreign influence through government-sponsored student groups,” Kim said.
Shanghai Jiao Tong and US Universities
The University of South Carolina, which has an exchange program with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, says its relationship with the Chinese institution “has been limited to sending a handful of our business students to SJTU for a semester; not part of research-oriented student exchange program,” Jeffrey Stensland, associate vice president for university communications at the University of South Carolina, told The Daily Signal.
The university does not currently have any students at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, according to Stensland.
The University of California at Berkeley, which also has a relationship with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, “complies with every single federal law, every state law, and every university policy that together ensure our relationships with foreign countries and entities operate in [a] manner consistent with our national interest,” Dan Mogulof, assistant vice chancellor at the school, said.
Meanwhile, other colleges, such as Drexel University in Pennsylvania, have already ended their program with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, but did not specify the reason why.
Northwestern University, Cornell University, University of Maryland, Johns Hopkins University, University of Texas at Austin, Yale University, and the University of Pennsylvania did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request for comment regarding their current relationship with Shanghai Jiao Tong University or whether their school would consider terminating relations with the Chinese institution over concerns of national security.
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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.