US-China tensions may affect home sales
GOP bill to limit land purchases by Chinese citizens
HOUSTON — After a Chinese billionaire with plans to create a wind farm bought up more than 130,000 acres of Texas land, some of it near an Air Force base, the state responded with a ban on such infrastructure projects by those with direct ties to China.
Now, a Republican state senator is proposing to broaden the ban, seeking to stop Chinese citizens and companies from buying land, homes, or any other real estate in Texas. “I will sign it,” Governor Greg Abbott wrote without equivocation on Twitter last month.
His endorsement underscored just how important foreign land ownership, particularly by Chinese buyers, has become as a political issue, not just in Texas but across the country.
Tensions have been rising between the United States and China over a range of issues, including international trade, recognition of Taiwan, and the war in Ukraine. On Friday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken abruptly canceled a planned weekend trip to China — the first by a US secretary of state since 2018 — after the discovery of what US officials described as a Chinese surveillance balloon drifting over the American heartland.
The geopolitical strain has fueled calls for a more aggressive approach to Chinese investments in the United States with an eye on security.
“We don’t want to have holdings by hostile nations,” Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida said in a news conference last month. Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia made it part of his State of the Commonwealth speech soon after, urging lawmakers in his state to prevent “dangerous foreign entities” tied to the Chinese government from purchasing farmland.
Chinese owners have very slowly expanded their holdings in US agricultural land in recent decades, but the increasingly hostile political climate has made the topic a rising concern, with at least 11 states considering some form of new legislation related to foreign ownership of farmland or real estate, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Some of the new and proposed laws go beyond targeting Chinese nationals to broadly take aim at ownership by all foreign governments, businesses, and new immigrants. Other laws, like the one under consideration in Texas, single out countries seen as particular security threats, including Russia, Iran, and North Korea, in addition to China.
Nor are Republican lawmakers the only ones challenging foreign land ownership. In California, a bill to rein in foreign ownership of farmland passed both Democratically controlled houses last year. The bill’s sponsor, Senator Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat, said it was an effort to stop the purchases while trying to better understand the motivation behind them.
“Something doesn’t smell right,” she said in an interview. Other Democrats, including in Congress, have proposed legislation to increase the oversight of foreign agricultural land purchases.
Lawmakers have expressed concern over the security of the nation’s food supply and worry that several land purchases were deliberately made near American military bases. Late last month, the Air Force weighed in on a Chinese company’s purchase of a corn mill in North Dakota, not far from a base, declaring it a “significant threat.”
Though the government did not specify the nature of the threat, beyond “near- and longterm risks of significant impacts to our operations in the area,” community leaders speculated that the mill could be used for spying on the Air Force, which the company denied.
State Senator Lois W. Kolkhorst, the sponsor of the Texas bill, said in a statement that foreign land ownership had become an issue in her district, a mostly rural area stretching west and south of Houston.
“One of the top concerns for many Texans is national security and the growing ownership of Texas land by certain adversarial foreign entities,” Kolkhorst said, referring to the Chinese purchase of the land near an Air Force base near Del Rio, Texas, for a proposed wind farm.
But the legislative push, while in some cases bipartisan, has largely brought opposition from Democratic elected leaders.
The bill, as written, would make it impossible for the large number of Chinese immigrants who have come to work in the tech sector or study at Texas universities to do something as basic as buy a home. It would not affect those who already own such property.