Republican Governors Fight the Chinese Communist Party’s U.S. Land Grabs
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Republican governors including Kristi Noem of South Dakota are coming out strong against the Chinese Communist Party and its attempts to buy land in the United States. Appearing on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, the governor explained that she is being proactive in preventing the Chinese government from buying up valuable farmland in strategically important South Dakota locations.
According to Noem, after the Chinese spy balloon debacle and the White House’s inaction, South Dakota has had to be very aggressive. “They’re purchasing our land so they can have a foothold right here in the center of the United States of America to conduct surveillance on our defense systems. It’s alarming,” she said. “And it’s very strange for South Dakota to have to be this aggressive, but when you have a lack of leadership in the White House, we have to do what we can do to protect our people.”
Noem pointed to the Grand Forks Air Force base and the unsuccessful recent attempt of a Chinese company to buy land near that base. The Air Force said its proximity would have posed a national security risk.
The South Dakota governor explained that she has been following the issue of Chinese investment since she was in Congress. “I recognized and saw them buying up our fertilizer companies, our chemical companies, buying our processing systems. They’re buying our food supply so they can control us,” Noem said, broadening out to say that China is also manipulating its currency and stealing America’s intellectual property.
For Noem, this is part of a larger strategy for China to assert itself as a global superpower at America’s expense. “The goal is to control us and to destroy us. China recognizes that the only way that they can have world dominance is to take out the United States of America,” she explained. “We stand in their path and they will use . . . Russia or North Korea or Iran to partner in unique ways to destroy us. So we need to wake up every single day recognizing what they’ve been doing for generations.”
The South Dakota governor was also an early opponent of allowing the social-media app TikTok on American smartphones. Last year, she signed an executive order banning state employees and contractors from using the app.
“I was the first governor to take action to ban TikTok here in our state. And we saw over two dozen different states take action, and Congress after that. We’re thankful that other people are waking up to how China is using its assets to conduct surveillance on the American people,” she said.
“Is the American people even willing to be inconvenienced to be safe anymore?” she said. “Will they even be inconvenienced anymore to continue to be free?”
Other Republican governors have taken similarly tough stances against China. On the same Fox News program, Florida governor Ron DeSantis committed to an aggressive stance against Chinese land purchases. “We are going to prohibit CCP-linked businesses from purchasing land in the state of Florida,” he said. “They want land grabs in our country, and we’re not going to allow it to happen in the state of Florida.”
Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin also raised the alarm earlier this month on CNBC. “What we’ve seen is the CCP and the Chinese government become much more aggressive about progressing their strategy . . . to dominate the world,” he said. “They’re using every arsenal element that they have from military coercion to economic coercion to surveillance.”
Youngkin added that in Virginia they have the Pentagon, Quantico, and Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world. Farmland is in close proximity to all of those national defense hotspots. “We’re not going to allow these bad actors to buy this farmland,” he said.
