Tom Cotton moves to ban China from buying US land
Why is China allowed to buy up U.S. land? Sen. Tom Cotton is trying to stop it.
Unknown to most Americans, the Chinese Communist Party has been buying our farms, land and even our homes for decades. Why? So they can take our food, technology and other resources for themselves.
What’s worse – it’s perfectly legal. That’s why I’ve introduced a bill to ban the Chinese Communists – and those acting on their behalf – from buying even another handful of American soil.
In recent years, China has exponentially increased its U.S. land holdings, especially of farmland. Between 2010 and 2020, China increased its agricultural land holding by nearly 2,500%, to encompass over 350,000 acres of American soil. Communists have not only purchased the fields and pastures of rural America, they have also taken control of food processing companies like the Virginia-based pork giant, Smithfield.
China's President Xi Jinping speaks to the College of Europe in Bruges, Belgium, April 1, 2014. (AP)
Chinese communists are gobbling up American agriculture in part because China can’t feed itself. While China is home to nearly 20% of the world’s population, it has less than 10% of the world’s farmable land. As a result, Beijing is forced to go elsewhere for sources of food, especially meat and other forms of protein.
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And the CCP’s purchases in the U.S. have largely paid off. At the height of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, Smithfield made sure China got the pork it needed – while American groceries stores ran short. By taking our land and food-processing companies for themselves, Chinese communists benefit their own people and gain leverage over the United States in one fell swoop.
But that isn’t the only reason China is putting down roots in the United States. In some cases, they use our land as strategic outposts to steal advanced American seed and farming technology. In other cases, they’ve bought large tracts of land near U.S. military bases.
In North Dakota, a Chinese firm purchased 300 acres a few miles from a U.S. Air Force base, which reportedly is home to America’s most sophisticated military drone technology. The base also has been called "the backbone of all U.S. military communications across the globe." Similarly, in Texas, a former Chinese military official purchased over 130,000 acres on the U.S.-Mexico border conspicuously close to Laughlin Air Force Base.
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As young Americans move off family farms and their aging parents increasingly retire from the business, China could buy even more. Millions of acres are expected to change hands in the next decade. We must ensure they don’t fall into the clutches of the Chinese Communist Party.
But the communists aren’t just capturing American agricultural land – they’ve also bought an astonishing amount of American real estate. Between 2010 and 2020, the American Realtors Association estimates that Chinese nationals bought over $200 billion worth of American real-estate, more than any other country in the world.
China’s 300,000-plus residential purchases in the United States since 2010 pose an unknown national-security danger, in addition to fueling the rising cost of living in places like California, where a disproportionate number of Chinese nationals buy. For America, allowing China to purchase our land is a lose-lose proposition.
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Our nation’s greatest enemy shouldn’t be allowed to purchase our homeland and turn it into de facto enemy territory. We would never have permitted Russian communists to acquire our land in the last Cold War, and we ought not to permit Chinese communists to do so in this Cold War.
We should not allow a single new tendril of communist influence to take root in American soil. We must ban communist land purchases now.
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