China has been buying up strategically placed farmland next to military installations across the US, raising national security fears over potential espionage or even sabotage.
The Post has identified 19 bases across the US from Florida to Hawaii which are in close proximity to land bought up by Chinese entities and could be exploited by spies working for the communist nation.
They include some of the military’s most strategically important bases: Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) in Fayetteville, North Carolina; Fort Cavazos (formerly Fort Hood) in Killeen, Texas; Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego, California, and MacDill air force base in Tampa, Florida.
Robert S. Spalding III, a retired United States Air Force brigadier general whose work focuses US-China relations told The Post: “It is concerning due to the proximity to strategic locations.
“These locations can be used to set up intelligence collection sites and the owners can be influential in local politics as we have seen in the past,” he added.
“It is alarming we do not have laws on the books that would prevent the Chinese from buying property in the US.”
Under the guise of farming, the Chinese landowners could set up reconnaissance sights, install tracking technology, use radar and infra-red scanning to view bases or attempt to fly drones over them as ways to surveil military sites, sources told The Post.
A report in the Wall Street Journal from September 2023 found Chinese intruders attempted to breach military facilities over 100 times in recent years, including sneaking onto a missile range in New Mexico and scuba divers spotted near a government rocket-launch site in Florida.
The threat the Chinese government poses to America is huge, with the FBI labelling it a “grave threat” and director Christopher Wray saying in April hackers have made their way into US critical infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow” and “physically wreak havoc.”
The Department of Homeland Security has also warned of the threat of Chinese spies slipping over the US Southern border, disguised as among the more than 30,000 who have already been admitted this since October last year. Those spies will likely “employ economic espionage” and “seek to illicitly acquire our technologies and intellectual property” according to DHS’s Homeland Threat Assessment 2024.
Morgan Lerette, a former contractor for private military contractor Blackwater is sounding the alarm.
“The Chinese are, or will, use this farmland to learn more about US military capabilities, movements, and technology,” Lerette told The Post.
“This will allow them to better understand how to transition their military from a defensive strategy to an expeditionary one,” he said, adding they’ll figure out “how to move forces quickly for conflicts such as taking Taiwan and how and when US forces would respond to their incursions based on troop movement at these bases,” he explained.
He added China will be watching troop movements into and out of bases in an attempt to form an idea of the patterns of behavior and movements.
“It would allow the Chinese to research what is moving and how to combat it. It’s easy to identify mobilization if you know what to look for.”
Lerette cited specific examples: “Listening to GIs at a bar talking … Local storage units being rented out near a base is an indicator troops are leaving.
“A train carrying tanks, Strykers [armored fighting vehicles], and [Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles], followed by an increased number of cargo planes landing and leaving a joint base like Lewis-McChord in Washington state, would indicate when US forces are moving,” all of which is invaluable military knowledge.
According to the latest analysis from the Farm Service Agency of the USDA, Chinese investors owned 349,442 acres of US farmland as of December 31, 2022.
One of the biggest investors in Texas is secretive billionaire Sun Guangxin, who has deep ties to the communist party and spent an estimated $110 million buying up land next to Laughlin Air Force Base in Val Verde County, a training ground for military pilots.
Although no overt evidence of spying by Guangxin’s companies, which use the land as a wind farm, has emerged the state’s republicans have raised the alarm.
Senator Ted Cruz, speaking in relation to the project, told Forbes: “The Chinese Communist Party has demonstrated time and again they’re willing to invest billions of dollars to expand their espionage capabilities and their global reach, including through land purchase schemes near military bases.”
Fufeng Group, a Shandong, China-based company that specializes in flavor enhancers and sugar substitutes, purchased 300 acres of farmland 40 miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base, North Dakota, in 2022.
Billionaire and Chinese Communist Party member Chen Tianqiao is the second-largest foreign owner of farmland in the US. He bought nearly 200,000 acres of farmland in Oregon in 2015 at about $430 an acre, according to the Land Report.
However, his purchase of the acreage did not appear in government records of land ownership by foreign investors when it was first revealed in January, according to the Daily Caller.
Chinese holdings total under one percent of foreign-owned agricultural land in the US, per NBC, but its the proximity to critical military installations which raises concerns, critics have charged.
For example, Fort Liberty in North Carolina, for example, is surrounded by Chinese-owned farmland within a 30-mile radius.
In a move acknowledging these security risks, a Chinese-backed cryptocurrency mining firm was barred from owning land in Wyoming in May by the Biden administration.
MineOne Partners, a firm partly backed by Chinese nationals, was told to move equipment from less than one miles from F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, saying it was a “national security risk,” per the Air Force Times.
Potential espionage attempts by Chinese operatives have prompted the Defense Department, FBI, and other agencies to heighten their investigations on so-called “gate-crashers” attempting to breach US military installations.
According to the Wall Street Journal report, the incidents largely appear designed to test security practices, officials explained.
US-China tensions also spiked in early 2023 after a Chinese surveillance balloon flew over the mainland.
The FBI has previously warned: “The Chinese government is engaged in a broad, diverse campaign of theft and malign influence without regard to laws or international norms that the FBI will not tolerate.”
At Fort Wainwright, Alaska, home to the Army’s 11th Airborne Division, a group of Chinese nationals attempted to push past guards, claiming they had hotel reservations on base.
In New Mexico, officials reported repeated cases of Chinese nationals taking pictures at a US Army range after straying from nearby White Sands National Park, according to WSJ.
Chinese nationals have also used drones to enhance their surveillance efforts. Key West, Florida, has seen repeated incidents at an intelligence center, where Chinese ‘tourists’ were found swimming near the military facility and snapping photos.
In 2020, three Chinese citizens were sentenced to prison after illegally entering the naval air station there, either walking around the fence or driving in and ignoring orders to turn back, the WSJ reported.
Meanwhile, the border has proven an even greater threat to America’s security.
By the end of the 2023 fiscal year, Customs and Border Protection officials apprehended 24,048 Chinese citizens at the border with Mexico, they revealed. That number is more than 12 times the 1,970 arrests in the previous fiscal year.
“They are a communist dictatorship no different from the [Soviet Union], except they have been integrated into the global economic system.
“This makes them even more dangerous than the USSR because of their political influence,” Spalding added.
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