Virginia Chinese Market Charged with Selling Wildlife
By wchung | 04 Apr, 2026

The managers of the Falls Church Great Wall Supermarket are charged with violating Virginia’s laws against selling wildlife. The live largemouth bass, turtles, bullfrogs and crayfish on display at its seafood counter are running afoul of the state’s laws meant to protect endangered species.

“If Chinese people like to eat yellow eels and it’s part of their traditional diets — just like Russian people like to eat fish eggs — and those eels are farm raised and are not an endangered species . . . why not?” said Shaoming Cheng, the attorney representing the market managers charged with violating wildlife protection laws.

“History has show when wildlife becomes commercialized, the population dwindles,” said Rich Landers, a Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries (DGIF) officer. “Whether it’s elephant tusks or whales, we are trying to reduce the chances that wildlife becomes commercialized.”

The Great Wall store on Gallows Road is part of a chain of Chinese supermarkets with branches in Maryland, New York, New Jersey and other states as well as Northern Virginia, home to over a quarter million Asians. Its inventory is typical of Asian markets found across the United States. It was singled out for prosecution because a wildlife activist happened to visit last spring and reported the offerings of the store’s seafood counter to the state wildlife authorities.

That led to a series of visits by DGIF officers who, over a two-month period, made several hundreds of dollars’ worth of undercover buys of largemouth bass, red-eared slider turtles, crayfish, bullfrogs, a Chinese soft-shell turtle and a swamp eel. One of the agents warned a Great Wall manager that it was illegal to sell some of the animals, according to court papers.

The case, filed in Fairfax County, is set for a hearing later this week in which the markets will seek to get the judge to dismiss the charges. The defendants’ position is that the laws are outdated and discriminate against the food traditions of Asian immigrants. The issue has arisen elsewhere across the country as laws designed to prevent poaching of endangered animals for meat and pelt are making lawbreakers out of merchants who secure food animals from fish farms.

The charges against managers Kai Wei Jin and Jinmiao Xia began as felonies but have been reduced down to misdemeanors. Essentially, they are charged with selling certain species of wildlife without permits. Under Virginia law wildlife is defined as any creatures not on a list of domestic animals which include cows, chickens, guinea pigs, rats, llamas and a few other species. The turtles and eels sold by Great Wall are not on that list.

The fight between wildlife conservationists and Asian markets has see much more action in California where the Asian population is about 16 times as large as Northern Virginia’s. There animal rights activists have sought to impose strict limits on Asian markets that sell turtles, frogs and other animals for food. One such effort was blocked in 2010 by a coalition of Asian American lawmakers who argued that the foods are staples of the Asian diet.