A 2022 Chinese land purchase in the U.S. also raised concerns. That spring, a food producer called Fufeng Group bought 370 acres for corn milling near an Air Force base in North Dakota. This prompted the Biden administration to propose a new rule: any foreign company or individual who wants to buy land within 100 miles of certain U.S. military bases (the North Dakota base included) needs government approval.
While Chinese ownership of U.S. land has been a hot topic among lawmakers — even becoming the center of a Montana Senate race this year — China only had a stake in 383,935 acres of U.S. land as of 2021, which is less than 1% of all foreign-held land.
It’s worth noting that a 2023 NBC investigation found that the foreign ownership reporting system is “lax and enforcement minimal,” with some purchases not reported to the USDA for years, but there is little evidence that Chinese land ownership in the U.S. exceeds its reported boundaries by any significant margin.
In testimony to the Senate agriculture committee in September, Michigan State’s Ortega said, “China’s investments in foreign agriculture are largely driven by its desire to build food self-sufficiency.” Former USDA chief economist Joe Glauber told the Washington Post that Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland is “literally a drop in the bucket.”
Despite this, in 2023 alone, at least 81 bills were proposed across 33 states that would restrict Chinese ownership of farmland and of any land near military bases. At least one of those bills passed, a Florida law that banned those who are not U.S. citizens and are “domiciled” in China from buying land or buildings. But the bill was blocked by a U.S. appeals court in February.
Though this new wave of Chinese land restrictions is notable in its volume (and its disproportionality to the amount of land that China actually owns in the U.S.), placing some limits on foreign landownership is a fairly common practice. About half of all states have laws restricting foreign landownership in some capacity, according to the National Agricultural Law Center, and at least 11 federal bills on the topic have been proposed in the last three years.
“We expect the political rhetoric on this to escalate and also expect more legislation to be introduced and passed,” John C. Yang, president and executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, told the Washington Post. “Even state legislators want to appear to be tough on China right now, and they are grasping for things that they can control in their own state legislatures to show that they are being tough.”
