IN-DEPTH: Battle for the Heartland—How US Farmland Is Quietly Falling Into Chinese Hands

Chinese ownership of US agricultural land saw a 2,400 percent increase in one decade

Dust rises from a combine during barley harvest in Reardan, Wash., on Sept. 26, 2016. In one decade, Chinese ownership of U.S. agricultural lands increased by more than 2,400 percent. Getty Images

The valleys give way to the prairies, and the prairies give way to the badlands, where fields of golden cinquefoils surrender to the might of towering plateaus of striated bedrock.

The rugged openness of South Dakota presents the quintessential image of the American countryside, a pure distillation of the natural environment that captured the pioneers’ hope for a better future all those years ago.

But how long this countryside remains American is now an open question in these parts.

That’s because Chinese-owned entities, some linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), have been purchasing land in South Dakota and elsewhere in the United States at a breathtaking pace for more than a decade.

Some of the land they gobble up is for farming, other acreage is allotted for energy use, and still more parcels are, forebodingly, adjacent to sensitive U.S. military sites.

Chinese holdings of U.S. agricultural lands reached more than 352,000 acres in 2020, more than 25 times the 14,000 acres owned in 2010, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates (pdf).

To stem the growing incursion, state governments across the nation are working desperately to craft legislation that would end the trend once and for all.

Too often, however, those efforts are met with resistance from entrenched business interests and, as was the case in South Dakota, are ultimately abandoned to placate private interests.

Cattle graze near Ojai, Calif., on June 21, 2022. Mario Tama/Getty Images

A Permanent Spy Balloon

The continued acceptance of CCP-backed acquisitions of U.S. land is an affront to American laws and norms, as well as a violation of equitable international practice, Adam Savit says. He heads the China Policy division of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a conservative think tank tasked with the mission of advancing policies that put U.S. citizens’ rights and well-being before other considerations.

To allow the regime to continue investing in U.S. land and resources, while U.S. companies are barred from doing the same in China, he said, runs counter to the value of “reciprocity” that so much international trust is necessarily built on.

“If we don’t have access to a resource, opportunity, or institution in the CCP, they should not have access to that in our country,” Savit told The Epoch Times.

To that end, Savit authored the institute’s latest issue brief (pdf), which tracks state responses to the growing threat posed by CCP land grabs in the United States.

Numerous states are now seeking to bar the CCP and similarly aggressive entities from purchasing U.S. land.

Much of this effort is no doubt a reaction to the alleged national security threat posed by allowing CCP-linked companies to purchase land in close proximity to U.S. military bases, as previously occurred in North Dakota, and efforts to buy huge swaths of land and energy infrastructure, as previously happened in Texas.

Savit said that CCP land near military bases is essentially a permanent version of a CCP spy balloon.

“They can station whatever they wish wherever they wish,” he said.

To that end, Savit underscored the necessity of state legislation to help curb the increasing Chinese investments in an area otherwise devoid of meaningful legal protections.

“In most states, there’s no legal barrier to [these purchases] right now and no process to vet or evaluate the side effects of that,” Savit said.

Seeing the struggles of its neighbor to the north, for example, South Dakota sought to insulate itself against similar incursions, with lawmakers crafting a law that would have granted the governor the ability to oversee foreign investment in real estate.

Despite initial support from state lawmakers, however, the bill was roundly defeated after all the state’s major agricultural associations and unions lobbied against it, for fear of giving too much power to the state’s executive branch and because of concern that the effort could ignite racial animosity toward Chinese Americans and immigrants.

Airmen assigned to the 319th Aircraft Maintenance Squadron from Grand Forks Air Force Base, N.D., perform a maintenance check on a drone on June 6, 2022. U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Ashley Richards

States Seek to Repel CCP Influence

South Dakota isn’t alone. The AFPI report highlights legal struggles underway in 23 states from Arizona to Virginia, totaling 53 separate measures.

In more than a dozen other states, Savit said, some laws already exist that could feasibly be used to prevent the Chinese acquisition of U.S. land, but they’re never enforced.

The legislation springing up across the country is as varied as the states giving rise to it, and it includes efforts to ban investments from CCP-linked entities in Iowa, a law to ban land purchases from revanchist nations such as North Korea and Iran in Georgia, and a blanket ban on all foreign land buys in Texas, which was recently diluted to apply only to state-linked entities.

Savit said that he believes “there’s no foolproof way” to prevent the CCP regime from getting its hands on U.S. land but commends the varied efforts of the states to address the issue in their own ways.

“There is no perfect way because each state has its different concerns,” he said. “Each state has its different existing laws. Each state has different agricultural sectors. These are all experiments.

“There is no one-size-fits-all answer. It’s a dynamic challenge.”

US Failing to Track Foreign Investments

The problem of determining who is a legitimate investor and who is a CCP proxy is a particularly daunting task for state governments, particularly at a time when record numbers of Chinese people are fleeing the country amid increasingly harsh repression efforts by the CCP.

For Savit and the AFPI, the issue is simple: Those with the resources to make the purchases likely have some connection to the CCP’s regime.

“An investor from China is going to have some sort of connection,” he said.

“Our assumption ... is that anyone with that capital or able to invest in that way has some sort of direct or indirect connection to the CCP or they’re being leveraged in some way.”

There’s one critical issue with that assumption, however: namely, that the United States has little to no understanding of who is actually buying the land.

Enter Lars Schonander, a policy technologist at the Lincoln Network think tank.

A sign opposing a corn mill in Grand Forks, N.D., stands near 370 acres recently annexed by the city for the project. Many residents don't want the project in the city because the owner has reputed ties to the Chinese Communist Party through its company chairman. Allan Stein/The Epoch Times

Schonander has spent considerable time in recent years tracking what he calls “malign foreign investment” in the United States—that is, investments made by hostile nations in the United States with the ultimate goal of exploiting or otherwise undermining the nation’s interests.

The relevant data needed to track such investments, he told The Epoch Times, are “private but not classified” and can be stunningly frustrating to access. Simply put, the federal government isn’t collecting in-depth data about foreign land purchases in the country.

“This plays out strangely specifically when one wants to look at detailed data [of foreign investments],” Schonander said.

“What I’ve discovered is the annual reports have high-level data on how much investors from a given country invest in a year, but you can only know what specific foreign corporations and entities are investing in by going to the private database, which makes it next to impossible if there is a specific project you’re concerned about.”

At present, the only federal law that tracks such investments is the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, which requires foreign entities to report transactions of farmland to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Schonander cautioned, however, that the USDA is authorized to acquire data on land purchases only up to three orders of ownership. This means that a series of U.S. shell corporations could be ultimately owned by a foreign entity and the agency would never know.

This issue is magnified, he said, by the long lag times between an investment being made and being recorded.

“There’s quite a bit of a lag between people maybe knowing of a certain investment and it actually being in the database,” Schonander said.

“The data is only updated at the end of a year. So, right now, we only have as of the end of last year, the 2021 data. At the end of this year, we’ll have the 2022 data.”

Because of this, Schonander noted, even members of Congress will be working with data that are, at best, a year old.

This isn’t to say that the government has always been aloof to the need for more granular data on foreign investments.

Schonander noted, for example, that the U.S. Energy Information Administration used to require details each year about foreign investments into U.S. energy infrastructure but that the single form that was used to collect that information had been discontinued following the federal government’s budget sequestration in 2011.

“It was quite valuable information because in the more recent reports they had acquisitions and investor data, which, nowadays, you’d probably have to either manually collect yourself or pay a data broker for,” Schonander said. “Now we have no idea publicly.”

With that in mind, Schonander said that collecting more useful data could be as simple as restarting the program to measure such investments using the tools previously set up for the same purpose.

“They have the form and they still have the personnel to set it up,” he said. “They just haven’t sent out the forms in over 10 years.”

A spokesperson for the Energy Information Administration told The Epoch Times that the agency has no plans to reinstate the program. The USDA didn’t respond by press time to a request by The Epoch Times for comment.