Chinese Companies Keep Buying U.S. Land Near Military Bases

National security experts warn that some of those purchases are too close for comfort.

Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/05/16/china-buy-u-s-farmland-near-military-bases-blocked-cfius/

The United States scrutinizes Chinese land purchases near military bases.

Around 43.4 million acres of U.S. agricultural land is at least partially owned by foreign investors, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued last year. A lot of this is owned by companies from close American pals—such as Canada and the Netherlands—for farming or timber, but there’s also a tranche owned by Chinese investors.

Too close for comfort. The Biden administration issued an order this week forcing a Chinese-backed cryptocurrency mining firm, MineOne, to divest from land it owns in Wyoming that just so happens to be very close to a U.S. Air Force base that houses nuclear weapons.

The U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a relatively obscure but immensely powerful body that reviews foreign investments for potential national security risks, spurred this action after it received a “public tip” about MineOne’s purchase within a mile of that air base in 2022, according to a Treasury Department statement.

The (land) plot thickens. What has national security officials and lawmakers in Washington rattled is not the net amount of land owned by Chinese investors—349,442 acres, or less than 1 percent of that total foreign-owned land—but rather where some of that land is. Namely, uncomfortably close to U.S. military bases and other national security installations.

New rules of the game. This isn’t the first such incident. In 2023, a Chinese food producer, the Fufeng Group, bought 370 acres of land near an Air Force base in North Dakota, spurring the Biden administration to issue a new rule that any foreigners wanting to buy land within 100 miles of a U.S. military base or other national security installation needs to first go to the U.S. government for approval. (MineOne did not do that in Wyoming.) That rule, overseen by the Treasury Department’s Office of Investment Security, is still being refined and amended to bulk up CFIUS’s oversight ability.

And back in 2020, the subsidiary of a Chinese energy company bought land near the Air Force’s largest pilot training base in southern Texas, as we previously reported.

The fear is that Chinese companies could use such land to snoop on the U.S. military, or as a launchpad for other espionage operations.

China hawks going local. This potential threat has taken on a particular resonance at the local level, as politicians in state and local governments try to glom onto the “tough on China” political wave already taking deep root in Washington. Because what’s more American than protecting farmland from the scourge of communism?

In 2023 alone, 33 states proposed at least 81 bills related to restricting Chinese ownership of U.S. land on national security grounds, as tallied by a study conducted by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs.

How far is too far? Still, there’s a debate on whether at least some of these legislative proposals go too far in a harmful direction, stoking xenophobia and discrimination. Florida proposed a law, championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, banning Chinese citizens from owning homes or lands in the state. A federal appeals court blocked that law from going into effect in February. That ruling “should serve as a warning to other states who are considering passing similarly racist bills, steeped in a history when Asians were ineligible for citizenship and were told they didn’t belong,” Bethany Li, the legal director of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, said at the time.

Open questions. Even with all the new attention and controversy, it’s hard to adequately assess how much land is really owned by Chinese entities, and what proportion of that actually constitutes a potential national security threat. A 2023 NBC News investigation found that the federal reporting system for tracking foreign-owned land is “lax and enforcement minimal.”