Why Is China Buying American Farmland?

 China is buying American land and companies, and the “United States government is not appropriately addressing the threat posed by growing Chinese ownership of American land,” according to Jason Hopkins at The Daily Signal and a report released by The Heritage Foundation today. Hopkins reported the following: 

… The report calls on federal and state leaders to take action, such as increasing transparency and conducting more critical reviews of land purchases.

“China’s ownership of American land is nontransparent and unscrutinized, and the federal government has failed to address potential threats even as Chinese ownership of U.S. real estate increases,” Bryan Burack, a senior policy adviser for The Heritage Foundation and author of the study, told the Daily Caller News Foundation….

The federal government lacks an adequate system in place to broadly monitor Chinese ownership of U.S. real estate, due to ownership of real estate being overseen by state and local governments, the report notes. For this reason, the U.S. government has no clear picture on China’s total land holdings in the country.

“The United States should be watching land and real estate transactions from our top adversary, not ignoring them,” Burack said.

Since the Daily Caller News Foundation and other individuals or organizations have “reported extensively on Chinese companies’ land purchases in the U.S., we know quite a bit about them. Here are a few of the things reported by the Daily Caller News Foundation:

• “[T]he parent company of battery maker Gotion, which plans to build factories in Michigan and Illinois, participated in Chinese Communist Party programs that acquire technology for China’s military." 
• “The Daily Caller News Foundation also exposed the CCP ties of companies attempting to set up shop near military bases in Kansas.”
• “Smithfield Foods, America’s largest pork producer, is owned by a Chinese firm and exported massive quantities of pork to its China-based ‘sister company’ as that company stockpiled food for the Chinese military.” 
• “Chinese entities have spent over $100 billion acquiring American companies since 2010, with many of these businesses owning real estate across the country, according to the report.” 
• “In 2020, the National Association of Realtors confirmed that China was the top foreign buyer of American real estate.” 
• “The Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act does give some insight into the amount of agricultural land being purchased by foreign entities. The latest Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act report indicates that Chinese investors own a relatively small fraction of the country’s privately held agricultural land, holding only 346,915 acres, or roughly 1%, of foreign-held acres of private land, as of Dec. 31, 2022.” 
• “However, Chinese-owned agricultural acreage grew over fivefold between 2011 and 2021, the report found.

There is more information in the article, but I have shared enough of the material to show that China is purchasing American land and companies. What do they plan to do about it?