DOJ: China Locked In a Shipping Cartel. The Timing Is Sus.
On January 22, 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice unsealed a superseding indictment in the Northern District of California against six Chinese companies — CIMC, Dong Fang International, CXIC, Singamas, and two unnamed co-conspirators — and seven executives. The charge: per se Sherman Act § 1 violation, conspiracy in restraint of trade by output restriction and price fixing. The six companies controlled approximately ninety-five percent of the world’s standard dry shipping containers.
What’s interesting isn’t the criminal charge. It’s the calendar. Every foundational act of the conspiracy pre-dates a certain pandemic. The Shenzhen cartel meeting on November 14, 2019 is three days before the earliest documented Hubei case. The Shanghai meeting on December 3 is five days before Wuhan’s first publicly acknowledged case. The Moon Gazing Fund enforcement contract was signed in March 2020 — the same month the WHO declared a pandemic and U.S. hospitals began rationing PPE.
Eric Garland is a strategic intelligence analyst with thirty years of practice.
Game Theory Today is his open-source intelligence channel on the games nations and companies actually play.
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→ Full timeline, including the U.S. executive-branch posture during the same window: https://ericgarland.substack.com/p/criminal-indictment-and-timeline
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→ Source the indictment yourself at justice.gov/atr.
Sources:
• United States v. China International Marine Containers (Group) Co., Ltd., et al., No. 25-CR-0311-YGR (N.D. Cal., Jan. 22, 2026)
• U.S. State Department, “The United States Announces Assistance to Combat the Novel Coronavirus” (Feb. 7, 2020)
• CDC, “First Travel-related Case of 2019 Novel Coronavirus Detected in United States” (Jan. 21, 2020)
• South China Morning Post, “China’s first confirmed Cvid-19 case traced back to November 17” (Mar. 13, 2020)
• Basavaraju et al., “SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence in U.S. Blood Donations, December 2019–January 2020,” Clinical Infectious Diseases (Nov. 30, 2020)
