China Forced to Give Up Land Owned in US

Arkansas has become the first state to order that a Chinese company give up ownership of local land, amid fears of attempts by Beijing to malignly infiltrate and influence the U.S. through various means.

On Tuesday, Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced that she was ordering Syngenta to relinquish its 160 acres of land holdings in northeastern Arkansas, accusing its owner of “posing a clear threat to our state.” The Switzerland-headquartered agricultural chemicals producer was acquired in 2017 by the state-owned China National Chemical Corporation, and primarily trades in pesticides and seeds.

“Seeds are technology,” Sanders said at a press conference. “Chinese state-owned corporations filter that technology back to their homeland, stealing American research and telling our enemies how to target American farms. That is a clear threat to our national security.”

Syngenta has yet to comment publicly on the announcement. Newsweek approached the company and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs via email for comment on Wednesday.

There have been growing concerns in the U.S. about China’s influence on the economy, with acute focus on the farming industry. In August, at a roundtable in Dysart, Iowa, hosted by a bipartisan delegation form Congress, farmers accused the Chinese state of stealing samples of genetically enhanced seeds—in some cases, straight from the field—in order to reproduce them back home.

The delegation cited a 2012 case in which a Dysart farmer spotted a man in business attire digging up hybrid seeds, which were then sent back to China. Mo Hailong was later arrested by the FBI for stealing U.S. agriculture trade secrets, and convicted of various crimes related to the long-term conspiracy in 2016.

The FBI estimates that Chinese intellectual property theft costs the U.S. economy anywhere between $225 billion and $600 billion a year, describing the east Asian nation as the world’s “principal” infringer of proprietary knowledge.

In 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that the agency had seen economic espionage cases linked to China increase by around 1,300 percent.

Sanders noted that Beijing enacted a law in 2017 that compels Chinese nationals living abroad to cooperate with its intelligence apparatus. “This is not about where you come from,” she said. “We welcome Chinese Americans.”

Official figures show Chinese investment in U.S. land makes up less than 1 percent of land under foreign ownership.

National security fears were raised earlier this year over a parcel of land 12 miles from the Grand Forks Air Force base in North Dakota, held by the Binzhou-headquartered Fufeng Group, where the company hoped to build a wet corn milling plant. Since then, questions have been raised about a mysteriously owned company which has been able to buy land bordering Travis Air Force Base in California.

There have been several recent legislative efforts to limit Chinese ownership of U.S. soil. In May, Florida introduced a new law banning Chinese nationals from buying land within a 5-mile radius of the state’s military installations.

“Other states should follow suit and refuse to let the Chinese Communists own American land,” Republican Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas wrote on X, in response to Sanders’ announcement.