AUSTIN, Texas—Chuck DeVore remembers when the FBI visited him some 17 years ago as a California lawmaker to tell him that he was under surveillance by the Chinese regime.
Instead, he found out he was being watched.
“It got so bad that the FBI actually came and visited me and told me that I was under surveillance and asked me if I had been visited yet,” DeVore said during the Texas Policy Summit discussion on China In February in Austin.
He recounted what the FBI told him: “This is unprecedented. We have never seen this before at the state level.”
DeVore, now chief national initiatives officer at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, said the Chinese pressure successfully killed the California measure—and Chinese agents have built on that success through the years.
Since then, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has become even more aggressive, organizing protests and intimidation campaigns against state lawmakers who support bills to protect their states from potential Chinese espionage and sabotage, he said.
Michael Lucci, founder and CEO of State Armor, which helps states counter global security threats, told The Epoch Times that 19 states have successfully passed legislation to stop foreign adversaries from buying agricultural land. Some have also limited purchases of land near military installations or sensitive infrastructure.
Some states are going further by introducing Pacific Conflict Stress Test Act legislation—which seeks ways to strengthen supply chains, cybersecurity, telecommunications, and public health in case of a conflict involving China.
Christopher Holton, director for state outreach at the Center for Security Policy, said during the summit that the United States is oblivious to what he called “a whole array of asymmetrical warfare against us.”
“The overwhelming full-court press that we’re getting from the Chinese Communist Party is so multifaceted that we, as a nation, are completely unprepared to deal with it.”
Targeting State Laws
Texas state Sen. Lois Kolkhorst, a Republican, said at the summit that she got involved in trying to pass legislation to rein in Chinese nationals or companies from purchasing land after hearing stories from her constituents.While attending Farm Bureau meetings a few years ago, constituents alerted her that Chinese nationals and companies were buying farmland.
Kolkhorst recalled that the mayor of the small town of Sealy, Texas, told her the old Stewart & Stevenson factory that used to make military vehicles had been purchased, but nobody could say who bought it.
She then heard from a rancher who owned property next to the factory that all the work there was being done at night.
As it turned out, she said, a Chinese company bought it.
Kolkhorst said she has since toured the plant, which makes copper coils for air conditioning. But she said the operation, which included barracks, struck her as odd.
The incidents prompted her to file Senate Bill (SB) 147 during the 2023 Texas Legislative session, Kolkhorst said.
The backlash was fierce and highly organized—successfully killing the bill, she said.
“I was called a racist hundreds of times, every day,” she recalled. “I remember one group was cornering me, and they were just so aggressive.”
According to information from the Tenth Air Force, part of the Air Force Reserve Command, obtained by The Epoch Times, the CCP launched a “misinformation” campaign on WeChat, developed by the Chinese, to kill the Texas bill.
Protesters working with the Democratic Party in her district, which includes the highly populated Harris and Fort Bend counties, staged organized demonstrations with signs to kill the bill, Kolkhorst said.
Opponents also bought billboards in Dallas and along the Interstate 35 corridor attacking the bill.
Protestors jam-packed the Senate hearing and used physical intimidation and threats against those who supported the bill, according to Kolkhorst.
“They would come into our office with cameras, you know, they were reporting, and we'd have to force them out,” she said.
“I think it goes directly back to the CCP organizing their different cells here to kill bills.”
Holton recalled a “circus” atmosphere inside a Louisiana Senate hearing when the committee considered a bill banning the purchase of agricultural land by foreign adversaries.
“It is organized. It is orchestrated. And these are not American citizens who are, generally speaking, taking part in those activities,” he said.
Chinese nationals were bused into the Louisiana capital by the hundreds, Holton said, and when lawmakers passed the bill in committee, the mob became aggressive.
State Countermeasures
Kolkhorst isn’t one to quit when it comes to protecting Texas from China. She introduced Senate Bill 17 for the 2025 legislative session, which picks up where the former bill left off by banning certain land purchases by China and other adversarial countries.The committee would examine potential local vulnerabilities and develop strategies to secure state systems and supply chains should Beijing use force to “reunify” with Taiwan.
Lucci said Democrats also support these bills curtailing CCP influence—such as Nebraska state Sen. Eliot Bostar.
“Given that Nebraska is the home to [U.S.] Strategic Command and other critical American assets, it is not hard to imagine Nebraska being a target of cyber attacks and other disruptions,” Bostar said when introducing the bill. “We cannot control these global risks, but we can and should prepare for them.”
The Strategic Command has jurisdiction over America’s nuclear arsenal.
Bostar told The Epoch Times that his interest in Chinese influence began about two years ago when he was talking to a fellow lawmaker about how a significant percentage of the telecommunication towers in Nebraska relied on Huawei, a Chinese telecom company.
That led to a bill denying state funds to telecommunication businesses using Huawei technology, he said.
During the Biden administration, the Federal Communications Commission in 2022 banned the sale of new equipment produced by Huawei and ZTE, another Chinese tech company, fearing they could carry out cyber espionage or cyberattacks on U.S. critical infrastructure.
Bostar said the first bill opened his eyes to potential threats states face from China, leading to other bills.
Another area of growing concern is research involving American genomic data conducted by companies controlled by foreign adversaries.
Military commanders in China have made public statements concerning the development of biological weapons based on genetics, Bostar said, prompting Nebraska lawmakers to propose legislation to safeguard the genetic information of Nebraskans, which is included in LB 644.
Friend or Foe?
Lucci said that in 2019, a Chinese think tank produced a report ranking the friendliness of U.S. governors toward Beijing, which was addressed by then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the National Governors Association in February 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic broke out.Pompeo warned that the CCP tried to influence the decision-making of U.S. state and local governments.
Currently, Lucci said he considers the states most aggressively resisting Beijing’s influence are Texas, Florida, Nebraska, and Oklahoma.
Oklahoma’s Office of Enterprise and Management Services was ordered to find vulnerabilities and implement solutions to secure the state against CCP threats to cybersecurity, infrastructure, and public health, among others.
“I can promise you, the Chinese Communist Party will find no friend in Oklahoma,” Stitt said at the time.
DeSantis pointed out that America’s dependence on China for goods and supplies during the pandemic should have been a wake-up call for the United States.
State Vulnerabilities
Lucci said that federal leaders on both sides of the political aisle have been clear about one thing.“They have been shouting, really, that China is inside critical infrastructure now, and they plan to hit it in the event of conflict,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a memo saying there are 12,000 Chinese internet-connected cameras attached to critical infrastructure across the United States through which they can conduct espionage and potentially sabotage, Lucci said, referring to a document obtained by ABC News in February.
States should consider removing Chinese-made components used in infrastructure and communications, such as routers, cameras, laser sensors, and battery management units, he said. Police departments should also consider an alternative to drones made in China.
The law was in response to the purchase of 140,000 acres of land near Laughlin Air Force Base outside Del Rio, Texas, by a former Chinese military officer who planned to build a wind farm and feed power into the state’s electrical grid.
One of the biggest risks facing states is electrical transformers, according to DeVore.
Large electrical transformers can cost $3 million and take a long time to produce, he said. They carry about 70 percent of America’s electricity; most are made in China, followed by South Korea. The United States makes 25 percent to 30 percent of the transformers it uses.
“I understand these large transformers are in short supply,” DeVore said. “If you build a new power plant, it may take up to four years before you can get one of these large transformers.”
Holton said as many as 400 of the large transformers throughout the United States were made in China, which gives Beijing backdoor access and the capability to shut them down remotely.
“That’s potentially crippling,” he said.
During his first term, Trump issued an executive order to stop the acquisition of Chinese transformers; however, President Joe Biden subsequently rescinded that order.
China’s Long Game
DeVore said many Americans don’t understand the CCP’s long game.He said when he was serving in the California Legislature, Chinese foreign ministry officials convinced many of his Democratic colleagues—such as Ted Lieu, now a congressman, and Karen Bass, the current Los Angeles mayor—to vote against the Tibet resolution.
“They were investing at the state level in relationships that they figure might be useful at some point in the future when these state lawmakers go on to become federal lawmakers,” DeVore said.
Holton added that the public seems to have forgotten that Chinese authorities knew that COVID-19—which many now believe came from China’s Wuhan lab—was highly contagious, yet Beijing told the World Health Organization the virus was not infectious.
“They cut off internal travel from Wuhan [city] and allowed international travel, which had the effect of biological warfare in spreading that virus,” he said.
Holton called the Chinese regime’s lack of transparency on the virus “one of the most heinous attacks on the world conducted in the past century.”
“A country that is capable of doing that is capable of doing much worse.”
Tactics to defeat a more powerful opponent include drug warfare, political warfare, lawfare, and economic pressure.
“We were sold a bill of goods 35 or 40 years ago that if we just do business with the Chinese, they'll become more democratic, and their system will become more pluralistic,” Holton said.
If anything, he said, the United States has been adopting more restrictive policies, following China.
