There’s a reason you haven’t heard much about Chinese interests buying up vast swaths of the American heartland in a plot to spy on and harm the American people.
The reason is that this is simply not happening. Latest figures from the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that Chinese companies and investors own three hundredths of 1% of all agricultural land in the U.S.
But a new Red Scare spilling across the country and resonating especially well with Fox News viewers depicts China snatching up huge chunks of agricultural land in a play to take over our food system and bring the United States to its knees. Such fears appear to be unfounded so far.
Never one to let facts get in the way of a good culture war battle cry, Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is proudly taking up the flag against China and sending out a press release to brag about it.
Sanders took the lead penning a letter to D.C. leadership, signed by the likes of Greg Abbott of Texas, Ron DeSantis of Florida and 14 other Republican governors, “calling for action to protect the United States from the imminent national security threat created by the Communist Party of China’s (CCP) efforts to amass U.S. land.”
“For too long, we have allowed dangerous and adversarial governments to infiltrate our country. Our States will tolerate such allowances no longer,” the letter to President Biden and Congress says.
To be fair, Sanders and her colleagues aren’t focused solely on agricultural land; any land owned by China will do. And it’s true that Chinese investment across the globe is ticking up, and that includes investment in American agricultural interests, bought for the sake of financial gain and food security for the world’s second-largest economy behind the U.S. But is that so sinister?
Regardless, Sanders has been capitalizing on xenophobic fears of Chinese land grabs for a while now.
In October, she and Arkansas Attorney General Tim Griffin clucked and waggled about kicking a Chinese-owned seed company off 160 acres in northeast Arkansas.
The Northrup King Seed Co. in Craighead County was a subsidiary of Syngenta Seeds, LLC, and Syngenta was purchased by China National Chemical Company (ChemChina) in 2017. As such, they had to go. The ouster was made possible by Act 636 of 2023, a new state law adopted by Arkansas’s Republican supermajority to ban foreign entities deemed enemies from owning Arkansas agricultural lands.
Does it matter that Syngenta is in the business of using technology to make farming more productive, which seems like a good thing?
And what about the Chinese-owned bitcoin mines that have cropped up around Arkansas, throwing out noise and heat and sucking down electricity and water? Why doesn’t the governor’s office care seem to care about those? It’s almost like this is all for show.