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US Increases Scrutiny Over Chinese Land Purchases Near Military Bases
States and federal governments are increasingly concerned over real estate purchases made by foreign nationals from adversarial countries.
July 05, 2024
Updated:
July 06, 2024
The windswept town of Cheyenne, Wyoming, known for its cowboy culture, doesn’t seem like the kind of place anyone would need to worry about geopolitical espionage.
Yet, the Biden administration was concerned enough in May to make a rare move and issue an executive order shutting down MineOne Partners Ltd. and its affiliates. The firms are majority-owned by Chinese nationals.
The 12-acre site, purchased in 2022, is a mile away from Warren Air Force Base, home to the U.S. Minuteman III nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
If not for a public tip, the federal government would not have known about the crypto mine site, which uses computers to mine Bitcoins.
Land purchased or owned by people and entities with ties to China and located near military facilities or infrastructure is being scrutinized more closely as tensions between Washington and Beijing rise.
Chinese investors made 97 land transactions between 2020 and 2022, the most of all foreign nationals. The data did not specifically list real estate deals, according to a 2022 report from the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS). CFIUS is responsible for tracking and investigating foreign nationals’ real estate and business purchases.
States with the largest Chinese holdings are Texas, 159,640 acres; North Carolina, 44,776 acres; Missouri, 43,071 acres; Utah, 32,447 acres; and Virginia, 14,382 acres, according to the USDA in its most recent report.
Most of the land is held by a handful of Chinese investors.
However, so far, federal legislation to limit Chinese nationals or entities from purchasing land has gone nowhere.
And presidential prohibitions of foreign acquisitions like the one President Joe Biden issued against MineOne are rare.
Only eight such orders have been made since the administration of President Gerald Ford in 1975, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In January, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported key weaknesses in identifying land purchases that could threaten national security, including the lack of coordination between government agencies and the use of paper forms instead of online forms at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to collect data on foreign land purchase.
The GAO said the USDA should also share land purchase data with the CFIUS in a timely manner instead of annually.
At a June 26 hearing, lawmakers on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability discussed Beijing’s efforts to undermine the United States on multiple fronts.
Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), who sits on the committee, said during the hearing that China is far more dangerous than the Soviet Union ever was.
Mr. Fallon, who also serves on the Armed Services Committee, said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is testing the resolve of the United States.
He called the CCP “dangerous, wealthy, and very well-armed bullies.”
“It will be a dark day for humanity if the Chinese Communist Party ever reaches their goal of world hegemony,” he said.
Later, Mr. Fallon told The Epoch Times that land purchases near military installations are a “grave threat” to national security.
“I’m choosing my words carefully. I don’t want to understate the threat because you can’t overstate it,” he said.
China’s track record makes such land purchases suspect, he said.
President Biden’s executive order to shut down the Wyoming crypto mine was the right thing to do, Mr. Fallon said.
In 2022, President Biden issued a separate executive order that expanded the scope of CFIUS to include foreign purchases that impact such areas as the U.S. supply chains and artificial intelligence.
Purchasing land in rural areas potentially gives the Chinese eavesdropping ability by tapping into fiber optics, cables, and other communications pathways that crisscross America, said Chuck DeVore, chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Mr. DeVore served in the Pentagon during the Reagan administration as a special assistant for foreign affairs.
Chinese telecommunications firms began providing cell phone towers in rural areas near military bases at cost several years ago, he said, which raised suspicions as to why the companies would operate without making a profit.
That leaves open the possibility for eavesdropping and jamming communications, Mr. DeVore said.
The federal government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an advisory in February that the Chinese-sponsored hacker group Volt Typhoon had “compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations—primarily in communications, energy, transportation systems, and water and wastewater systems” throughout the country.
Hackers are “seeking to pre-position themselves on IT networks for disruptive or destructive cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict with the United States,” the government warned.
MineOne Partners did not immediately respond to a request for comment when contacted by The Epoch Times.
China’s Long Game
Experts say the United States needs a holistic approach across government agencies to address threats to national security from the CCP.
Ret. Navy Capt. Jim Fanell, who testified at the June 26 hearing, said he considers the China threat severe enough to warrant moving CFIUS from the Treasury Department to the Defense Department.
“If we fail, America will surely fall under the boot of an expansionist, genocidal, and totalitarian Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Fanell told lawmakers.
Erik Bethel, a global financial expert who has represented the United States at the World Bank, testified that the United States and the rest of the world need to pay attention to Chinese land purchases.
He noted China’s purchase of hundreds of thousands of acres in Latin America that could be used against the United States through military applications.
China has a military space station in Argentina that can track polar low Earth orbit satellites, enabling the CCP to track hypersonic weapons, he said.
In Panama, China owns container terminals on both sides of the canal, which is a vital passage for the U.S. supply chain.
“It’s not just in the United States,” he said. “We should be aware that China’s encircling us, and we need to kind of wake up and get out of the matrix,” Mr. Bethel said.
Buying in the Heartland
In total, there are 44 million acres of foreign-held U.S. agricultural land, according to the USDA report.
The annual report, which shows agricultural land that is foreign-owned or leased as of Dec. 31, 2022, is issued under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 (AFIDA).
Canadian investors own the largest amount of reported foreign-held agricultural and non-agricultural land, with 32 percent, or 14.2 million acres, according to the report.
image-5681191
China was much further down the list, with some 347,000 acres, amounting to less than 1 percent of foreign-held acreage.
The Chinese company with the most land is Murphy Brown LLC and associated companies, which bought the pork-production company Smithfield Foods, and now owns 141,000 acres across several states, according to the report.
Likewise, Chinese billionaire Sun Guangxin, owner of Guanghui Energy, purchased land near Laughlin Air Force Base in South Texas through Brazos Highland Properties LP and Harvest Texas LLC for a combined total of 132,000 acres.
That made Mr. Sun the second largest Chinese landowner in the United States in 2022.
The Texas land deal is one of several high-profile cases in which the federal government hasn’t blocked land sales to Chinese businesses. CFIUS didn’t deem the transaction a national security threat and allowed it to go through.
The billionaire, who was an officer in the Chinese military, spent an estimated $110 million for the land between 2016–2018 to build a wind farm that would sit near the Texas base used to train military pilots.
At the time, a spokesman for one of Mr. Sun’s energy companies denied accusations of spying to a local publication.
In 2021, Texas lawmakers stepped in to ban Chinese companies from accessing the state’s power grid and other critical infrastructure, prompting the aspiring wind farm developer to sell his interest to Spanish company, Greenalia.
Another high-profile case involved the Fufeng Group, a Chinese business that produces bio-fermentation products such as sweeteners from corn.
In 2022, the group purchased 300 acres of farmland 12 miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota.
CFIUS reviewed the Fufeng purchase but eventually concluded that it lacked jurisdiction to stop the investment as the base was not listed as a sensitive facility, according to testimony before the Committee on Agriculture.
(The article continues,,,,,,,,,,,,)
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/us-states-increase-scrutiny-over-chinese-land-purchases-near-military-bases-5679619?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2024-07-06&src_cmp=gv-2024-07-06&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAbOw4fRoezNLo4bIHsitaBLnwTdYUIEaUjabX%2BgnCPLEl
States and federal governments are increasingly concerned over real estate purchases made by foreign nationals from adversarial countries.
July 05, 2024
Updated:
July 06, 2024
The windswept town of Cheyenne, Wyoming, known for its cowboy culture, doesn’t seem like the kind of place anyone would need to worry about geopolitical espionage.
Yet, the Biden administration was concerned enough in May to make a rare move and issue an executive order shutting down MineOne Partners Ltd. and its affiliates. The firms are majority-owned by Chinese nationals.
The 12-acre site, purchased in 2022, is a mile away from Warren Air Force Base, home to the U.S. Minuteman III nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles.
If not for a public tip, the federal government would not have known about the crypto mine site, which uses computers to mine Bitcoins.
Land purchased or owned by people and entities with ties to China and located near military facilities or infrastructure is being scrutinized more closely as tensions between Washington and Beijing rise.
Chinese investors made 97 land transactions between 2020 and 2022, the most of all foreign nationals. The data did not specifically list real estate deals, according to a 2022 report from the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS). CFIUS is responsible for tracking and investigating foreign nationals’ real estate and business purchases.
States with the largest Chinese holdings are Texas, 159,640 acres; North Carolina, 44,776 acres; Missouri, 43,071 acres; Utah, 32,447 acres; and Virginia, 14,382 acres, according to the USDA in its most recent report.
Most of the land is held by a handful of Chinese investors.
However, so far, federal legislation to limit Chinese nationals or entities from purchasing land has gone nowhere.
And presidential prohibitions of foreign acquisitions like the one President Joe Biden issued against MineOne are rare.
Only eight such orders have been made since the administration of President Gerald Ford in 1975, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
In January, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported key weaknesses in identifying land purchases that could threaten national security, including the lack of coordination between government agencies and the use of paper forms instead of online forms at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to collect data on foreign land purchase.
The GAO said the USDA should also share land purchase data with the CFIUS in a timely manner instead of annually.
At a June 26 hearing, lawmakers on the Committee on Oversight and Accountability discussed Beijing’s efforts to undermine the United States on multiple fronts.
Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas), who sits on the committee, said during the hearing that China is far more dangerous than the Soviet Union ever was.
Mr. Fallon, who also serves on the Armed Services Committee, said that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is testing the resolve of the United States.
He called the CCP “dangerous, wealthy, and very well-armed bullies.”
“It will be a dark day for humanity if the Chinese Communist Party ever reaches their goal of world hegemony,” he said.
Later, Mr. Fallon told The Epoch Times that land purchases near military installations are a “grave threat” to national security.
“I’m choosing my words carefully. I don’t want to understate the threat because you can’t overstate it,” he said.
China’s track record makes such land purchases suspect, he said.
President Biden’s executive order to shut down the Wyoming crypto mine was the right thing to do, Mr. Fallon said.
In 2022, President Biden issued a separate executive order that expanded the scope of CFIUS to include foreign purchases that impact such areas as the U.S. supply chains and artificial intelligence.
Purchasing land in rural areas potentially gives the Chinese eavesdropping ability by tapping into fiber optics, cables, and other communications pathways that crisscross America, said Chuck DeVore, chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Mr. DeVore served in the Pentagon during the Reagan administration as a special assistant for foreign affairs.
Chinese telecommunications firms began providing cell phone towers in rural areas near military bases at cost several years ago, he said, which raised suspicions as to why the companies would operate without making a profit.
That leaves open the possibility for eavesdropping and jamming communications, Mr. DeVore said.
The federal government’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued an advisory in February that the Chinese-sponsored hacker group Volt Typhoon had “compromised the IT environments of multiple critical infrastructure organizations—primarily in communications, energy, transportation systems, and water and wastewater systems” throughout the country.
Hackers are “seeking to pre-position themselves on IT networks for disruptive or destructive cyberattacks against U.S. critical infrastructure in the event of a major crisis or conflict with the United States,” the government warned.
MineOne Partners did not immediately respond to a request for comment when contacted by The Epoch Times.
China’s Long Game
Experts say the United States needs a holistic approach across government agencies to address threats to national security from the CCP.
Ret. Navy Capt. Jim Fanell, who testified at the June 26 hearing, said he considers the China threat severe enough to warrant moving CFIUS from the Treasury Department to the Defense Department.
“If we fail, America will surely fall under the boot of an expansionist, genocidal, and totalitarian Chinese Communist Party,” Mr. Fanell told lawmakers.
Erik Bethel, a global financial expert who has represented the United States at the World Bank, testified that the United States and the rest of the world need to pay attention to Chinese land purchases.
He noted China’s purchase of hundreds of thousands of acres in Latin America that could be used against the United States through military applications.
China has a military space station in Argentina that can track polar low Earth orbit satellites, enabling the CCP to track hypersonic weapons, he said.
In Panama, China owns container terminals on both sides of the canal, which is a vital passage for the U.S. supply chain.
“It’s not just in the United States,” he said. “We should be aware that China’s encircling us, and we need to kind of wake up and get out of the matrix,” Mr. Bethel said.
Buying in the Heartland
In total, there are 44 million acres of foreign-held U.S. agricultural land, according to the USDA report.
The annual report, which shows agricultural land that is foreign-owned or leased as of Dec. 31, 2022, is issued under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act of 1978 (AFIDA).
Canadian investors own the largest amount of reported foreign-held agricultural and non-agricultural land, with 32 percent, or 14.2 million acres, according to the report.
image-5681191
China was much further down the list, with some 347,000 acres, amounting to less than 1 percent of foreign-held acreage.
The Chinese company with the most land is Murphy Brown LLC and associated companies, which bought the pork-production company Smithfield Foods, and now owns 141,000 acres across several states, according to the report.
Likewise, Chinese billionaire Sun Guangxin, owner of Guanghui Energy, purchased land near Laughlin Air Force Base in South Texas through Brazos Highland Properties LP and Harvest Texas LLC for a combined total of 132,000 acres.
That made Mr. Sun the second largest Chinese landowner in the United States in 2022.
The Texas land deal is one of several high-profile cases in which the federal government hasn’t blocked land sales to Chinese businesses. CFIUS didn’t deem the transaction a national security threat and allowed it to go through.
The billionaire, who was an officer in the Chinese military, spent an estimated $110 million for the land between 2016–2018 to build a wind farm that would sit near the Texas base used to train military pilots.
At the time, a spokesman for one of Mr. Sun’s energy companies denied accusations of spying to a local publication.
In 2021, Texas lawmakers stepped in to ban Chinese companies from accessing the state’s power grid and other critical infrastructure, prompting the aspiring wind farm developer to sell his interest to Spanish company, Greenalia.
Another high-profile case involved the Fufeng Group, a Chinese business that produces bio-fermentation products such as sweeteners from corn.
In 2022, the group purchased 300 acres of farmland 12 miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota.
CFIUS reviewed the Fufeng purchase but eventually concluded that it lacked jurisdiction to stop the investment as the base was not listed as a sensitive facility, according to testimony before the Committee on Agriculture.
(The article continues,,,,,,,,,,,,)
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/us-states-increase-scrutiny-over-chinese-land-purchases-near-military-bases-5679619?utm_source=Goodevening&src_src=Goodevening&utm_campaign=gv-2024-07-06&src_cmp=gv-2024-07-06&utm_medium=email&est=AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAbOw4fRoezNLo4bIHsitaBLnwTdYUIEaUjabX%2BgnCPLEl
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