China is buying billions in US farmland and lawmakers are scrambling to try to stop them
U.S. lawmakers are acting with increased concern as Chinese purchasers are buying tens of thousands of acres of U.S. farmland.As of the start of 2020, Chinese investors owned about 192,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land valued at about $1.9 billion, according to Politico. While Chinese land ownership in the U.S. is less than that of other foreign nations, the growth in Chinese land ownership is part of an overall trend in China rapidly buying up other country’s farmland over more than a decade.
Revelations from a groundbreaking exclusive CNN story published on July 23 about telecommunications equipment from China’s Huawei installed in rural America suggest that Chinese land purchases could pose a severe national security threat as well.
China’s state-supported telecommunications giants, Huawei and ZTE, sold cell tower equipment and routers, often at a loss, to small, rural telecommunications providers in the heartland. Much of the made-in-China equipment was installed adjacent to the land-based leg of America’s nuclear triad — the 400 Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) — in Colorado, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
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