“A Restoration News Investigation

Editor’s note: The new cold war is anything but. The Chinese Communist Party is waging war against American health and morale, and that battle extends to the very soil of the republic itself. Generations of Americans fought to conquer, purchase, and settle North America; yet too many lawmakers are content to sell it to a hostile bidder with little concern for the future of our nation. In this Restoration Investigation, we reveal the menace in our own homeland and call on leaders to take swift action.

Georgia Watts contributed to this report

America has been selling the land under our very feet to overseas interests for more than a generation. Investors, corporate conglomerates, and even the governments of more than 100 countries now own a piece of American farm or forest land—45 million acres in all.

That’s more than triple the amount of foreign-owned land compared with 1990. Back then, just one percent of all privately held agricultural land was foreign owned. Today it’s 3.5 percent—and rising.

The most concerning owner is the People’s Republic of China, which today controls 277,000 acres across 29 states and Puerto Rico. By one estimate, that’s more farmland than Bill Gates owns.

Recent media coverage vastly underestimates the amount of land China owns near our domestic military bases. The New York Post reported in 2024 that 19 military bases had Chinese-owned farmland nearby. But an analysis by Restoration News shows it’s almost twenty times that amount. While tiny compared with the vast swaths controlled by NATO allies such as Germany and Canada—the latter of which owns 33 percent of the 45 million foreign-owned acres—Chinese-owned agriculture land is situated close to more than 340 U.S. military bases and National Guard armories.

Among these are facilities dedicated to high-tech weapons research. Others control America’s nuclear forces and the President’s Marine One helicopter fleet. Still more would be crucial to any war fought in the Pacific theater. None of this is lost on Communist China, whose leadership considers its insertion into America’s $1.5 trillion agricultural industry crucial to Beijing’s national security strategy.

In this Restoration Investigation, we take you deep into the infiltration of our food supply, Chinese corporate espionage, the threat to America’s electrical grid, and even the black market drug cartels operating inside our borders.

The Land of the Free, Home of the Brave is enriching its enemy and impoverishing its own people one parcel at a time. And we handed them the deed.

War By Other Means

The People’s Republic of China outlawed foreigners from owning Chinese land when it took power in 1949. All land officially belongs to the communist state; any real estate leased to non-Chinese automatically reverts to the government after 70 years.

In contrast, the United States has some of the most permissive laws on earth enabling foreign land ownership.

California’s constitution guarantees “noncitizens . . . the same property rights as citizens.” New York law states “noncitizens are empowered to take, hold, transmit, and dispose of real property within this state in the same manner as native-born citizens.” Michigan’s constitution similarly provides that “aliens who are residents of this state shall enjoy the same rights and privileges in property as citizens of this state.”

Shockingly, there is no federal regulation of foreign land ownership. Only a handful of states restricted the practice before 2023, and only then for obscure administrative reasons that had nothing to do with national security. Today, 29 states—all but two of them Republican-run—have passed restrictions meant to counter Chinese infiltration.

Texas became one of them in 2025 after news reports revealed Sun Guangxin, a Chinese billionaire with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, was gobbling up land along the border with Mexico. The legislature swiftly outlawed the sale of farmland to foreign interests, citing China’s “aggressive whole-of-government approach . . . to surpass the United States” and “conduct covert influence operations” within our borders.

That’s important because Texas is the state with the most foreign-owned land: 5.6 million acres, more than 3 percent of its total acreage. Most is controlled by friendly European countries looking for cheap and stable long-term investments for their bloated pension systems.

Yet roughly half of all Chinese-controlled farmland is found in Texas—123,708 acres as of 2023.

The rest is spread across North Carolina (44,263 acres), Missouri (42,905), Utah (33,035), and Florida (12,798).

Of these five states, only Missouri restricted foreign land purchases before 2023. Now all of them do, yet together they account for 93 percent of all Chinese-owned farmland in America, according to the U.S. Agriculture Department (USDA).

Tracking foreign land investment is the job of the USDA’s Farm Service Agency, per a 1978 federal law requiring “any foreign person who acquires or transfers an interest in U.S. agricultural land” disclose the transaction within 90 days or face a fine.

In other words, the system relies on self-reporting that experts warn may not account for foreign investment masked by shell companies. Congress itself highlighted the problem in the 2024 Farm Bill by proposing tougher fines for shell entities that fail to comply with the law. But these are civil penalties, not criminal, offering little reason to think federal law will deter future purchases by hostile countries.

“The problem of foreign adversary-owned land and real estate is under-reported, under-assessed, and under-studied,” Michael Lucci, founder and CEO of State Armor, told Restoration News. “We likely only see a sliver of their actual holdings because a great deal of CCP land holdings are either held in intentionally opaque ownership structures or are not reported to the USDA at all.”

“I would rank the risk starting with property next to military installations, like those at Barksdale and Whiteman [Air Force Bases], then ownership of critical infrastructure and property near critical infrastructure, and finally ownership of farmland,” he explained.

The Military Proximity Problem

In 2023, multiple news outlets reported that Chinese-owned agricultural land touched 19 U.S. military bases. By our count, the true figure is 18 times higher.

Restoration News mapped Chinese-owned agricultural land in proximity to one of 342 U.S. military installations. While far from exhaustive, these represent a slice of some of the most important military sites in the American homeland.

Lucci calls it an “emergency.”

“China is positioning itself to sabotage our key military assets and critical infrastructure in a conflict. In the meantime, their proximity to these assets allows them to collect incredibly rich data about the assets themselves and the Americans who keep our country and military in top shape,” he told me.

INTERACTIVE MAP AVAILABLE HERE

Check out the interactive map here

    U.S. Southern Command (FL) & MacDill Air Force Base (FL)—Southern Command is Responsible for military operations in Latin America. MacDill AFB is headquarters of CENTCOM and SOCOM, the War Department’s brains for military operations in the Middle East, central Asia, and those involving elite special forces.

    Fort Meade (MD)—National Security Agency (NSA) headquarters and the nerve center of U.S. signals intelligence and cyber operations, making it perhaps the most important intelligence facility on earth.

    Fort Detrick (MD) and Dugway Proving Ground (UT)—Fort Detrick is America’s premier biodefense research hub, responsible for developing vaccines for high-threat pathogens such as Ebola, anthrax, and plague. The Dugway Proving Ground is used for extensive chemical and biological defense testing.

    F.E. Warren Air Force Base (WY)—One of America’s three ICBM bases controlling one-third of our Minuteman III nuclear arsenal.    

    Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton (CA) & Camp Lejeune (NC)—The Marine Corps’ main expeditionary bases for the Pacific and Atlantic theaters, respectively.

    Travis Air Force Base (CA)—Virtually all cargo and troop movements to the Pacific theater pass through Travis, essential to winning a war with China.

    Buckley Space Force Base (CO)—Responsible for missile warning and space-based intelligence, crucial to detecting incoming nuclear attacks.

    Fort Belvoir (VA)—Houses the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Army Cyber Command, and Defense Logistics Agency, and provides key administrative support to the War Department.

    Marine Corps Base Quantico (VA)—Site of the Marine Corps Officer Candidates School and FBI Academy, and the President’s fleet of Marine One helicopters.

    Norfolk Naval Shipyard, Naval Station Norfolk, Newport News Shipbuilding (VA)—Together the most important shipbuilding yards in the United States. Naval Station Norfolk is the world’s largest naval base hosting the Atlantic fleet’s carrier strike groups, amphibious forces, and naval aviation wings. Newport News Shipbuilding builds our Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers and half of our nuclear submarines.

    Joint Base Langley-Eustis (VA)—Headquarters of Air Combat Command responsible for equipping, organizing, and training our combat aircraft.

    Naval Base San Diego (CA)—The Pacific Fleet’s primary West Coast homeport, containing the largest concentration of naval power on the western seaboard.

     Fort Liberty (NC)—Home of three crucial rapid-response units: the 82nd Airborne, XVIII Airborne Corps, and U.S. Army Special Operations Command.

    Hill Air Force Base (UT)—The Air Force’s largest depot for housing F-35 fighter jets and ICBMs.

    Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst (NJ)—The Atlantic theater’s most important transport hub.

    Fort Jackson (SC)—The Army’s largest basic training installation responsible for half its enlisted force.

    Joint Base San Antonio (TX)—Trains Air Force pilots, cyber experts, and medical personnel.

    Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake (CA)—Research hub responsible for nearly every air-launched weapon in the American arsenal including the AIM-9 Sidewinder, an air-to-air missile, and Joint Direct-Attack Munition system used in precision-guided munitions.

    Naval Air Station Lemoore (CA)—Largest naval air station on the West Coast, responsible for deploying all Pacific Navy strike fighters.

    NAS Whidbey Island (WA)—The sole home of the Navy’s EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft.

    Aberdeen Proving Ground (MD)—The Army’s primary weapons testing and evaluation center, as well as chemical defense.

    Patrick Space Force Base (FL)—Supports civil and military space launches at nearby Cape Canaveral. Home of STARCOM, the Space Force’s field command.

    Harvey Point Defense Testing Activity (NC)—Provides special training in counter-terrorism, explosives, and paramilitary operations to agents of the CIA, FBI, Secret Service, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. The Navy SEALs who captured Osama bin Laden in 2011 were trained here.

    Warrenton Training Center (VA)—A facility so highly classified its exact functions are unknown. It is believed to be a key node in signals intelligence and continuity of government plans.

    Picatinny Arsenal (NJ)—Center of armament research and development that provides 90 percent of conventional ammunition for all military branches.

    Earle Naval Weapons Station (NJ)—Supplies ammunition for the Atlantic fleet.

    Fort Knox (KY)—Houses the U.S. Bullion Depository containing 147 million ounces of gold.

Pushing Hot Air

Sun Guangxin is a Chinese billionaire who in 2024 sued Texas’ foreign land-buying law as “unconstitutional” because it blocked his plans to erect dozens of 700-foot-high wind turbines near a major Air Force base.

Sun is the founder and chairman of Xinjiang Guanghui Industry Investment Group, a $24 billion-per-year conglomerate with subsidiaries in oil and gas, mining, construction materials, automotive sales, and real estate. Sun—a former PLA senior officer who fought in the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War—is reportedly Xinjiang province’s richest man, worth an estimated $3 billion.

Xinjiang is the center of China’s vast internment camp archipelago, where close to 2 million Uyghur Muslims are enslaved by the government and subject to sterilization, torture, political reeducation—and forced factory labor. The U.S. government considers any good from Xinjiang automatically manufactured with slave labor unless proven otherwise. China, of course, denies any and all such accusations.

At least one watchdog accuses Xinjiang Guanghui Group—and Sun personally—of engaging in “state-sponsored labor transfers” designed to break up minority families and dissolve Uyghur culture. Multiple Guanghui factories are reportedly based in Uyghur villages, which critics call controlled labor pipelines.

The company boasts it promotes “stability”—a revealing policy phrase that indicates surveillance, social control, and forcible integration of minorities into state-directed systems. “Stability” in Chinese is a hard, technical term. Maintaining stability is one of the CCP’s key objectives for maintaining power through narrative control, censorship of regime-damaging information, and violent repression of dissent. In Xinjiang specifically the term also suggests smashing separatism, since the Uyghurs are Turkic Muslims who twice attempted to carve out an independence republic in the 20th century.

Given Guanghui’s size and diversification, the company may act as a bridge between domestic repression and global commerce—landing squarely in Val Verde County, Texas (population 48,000, poverty rate 16.6%), on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Between 2016 and 2019, Brazos Highland Properties LP—a developer owned by Sun, per legal records—purchased 10 ranches totaling 140,000 acres. The project, dubbed Blue Hills Wind Development, would have placed 46 wind turbines across the property, each 700 feet tall, the tallest in the state. They would have likely come from China, which manufactures 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines—largely in Xinjiang province.

The turbines would’ve also connected to the Texas electrical grid, risking foreign intrusion into the single piece of infrastructure capable of returning America to the Stone Age. In 2023, Chinese hackers attempted to breach the Texas power grid. They failed, but succeeded in Massachusetts, where hackers stealthily collected information on local grid operations for more than 300 days before U.S. authorities noticed the intrusion.

Blue Hills Wind Development was also placed squarely in the path of Laughlin Air Force Base’s military training routes. Laughlin is one of two major bases responsible for training some 400 U.S. fighter pilots annually.

Sun’s purchase prompted lawmakers to pass Texas’ ban on foreign-owned land and courts dismissed the CCP billionaire’s lawsuits on procedural grounds.

But it raises a question: What’s Beijing’s endgame? Why buy farmland at all? The most mundane answer, unsurprisingly, has to do with food.

Keeping Them Off the Farm

Famine is as old as Han civilization; historians report more than 1,800 famines in the country since 108 BC. Yet the current government, ruled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), is responsible for the worst, caused by Chairman Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). That famine killed 15–50 million people, the worst in human history, and fractured the CCP. The second-worst: the 10 million victims of Soviet Ukraine’s Holodomor beginning in 1932.

The shadow of these embarrassments still haunts Russia and China decades later.

Across its 69-year reign, the Soviet Union never figured out how to feed itself. It was his tour of a Texas supermarket—not a military base—in 1990 that convinced future Russian President Boris Yeltsin that Communism had utterly failed. If his fellow Russians could see how superior U.S. supermarkets were, the stunned reformer said, “there would be a revolution.”

Only a year earlier, China’s Tiananmen Square protests took place during high food prices. COVID-induced panic buying triggered Xi Jinping’s nationwide “Clean Plate Campaign” to cut food waste.

“We should recognize that the issue of food security is a red line that would trigger terrible consequences were it ever to be compromised,” Xi Jinping said in December 2013. “We must adhere to the national food security strategy that puts [China] first.”

Xi considers food security “a major test of our ability to govern.”

“If our party is in power in China, if we can’t even do a good job in food safety, and if we can’t do it well for a long time, some people will ask whether it is enough or not.”

China is both the world’s largest food producer and its largest food importer, roughly half of which comes from the United States, Canada, and Brazil. Think huge quantities of soybeans, dairy, seafood, grains, meat—and even rice. It comes down to sheer size and geographic limits.

China and the U.S. alike boast roughly 9 percent of the globe’s arable land and 6-7 percent of its freshwater resources. Whereas just 4.5 percent of the global population is American, however, 20 percent is Chinese.

The country’s lightning-fast economic growth and urbanization have exacerbated basic problems of geography. Fully 40 percent of China’s soil is too degraded by pollution, erosion, and overuse for agriculture while 19 percent of its farmland is contaminated by heavy metals such as cadmium, arsenic, and lead. Perhaps 70 percent of the country’s freshwater lakes and rivers are too polluted for irrigation.

This challenging reality isn’t lost on military planners in either country.

‘Every Grain a Result of Hard Work’

China hoards as much as 50 percent of the globe’s wheat reserves and 60 percent of its rice supplies—an enormous hedge against future epidemics, trade disruptions, or world war.

This is sensible for a country vulnerable to starvation. A century ago, Great Britain’s naval blockade starved 763,000 civilians to death in World War I Germany, a continental empire dependent on foreign imports of all kinds.

Likewise, China’s entire economy is built on selling goods overseas to purchase food and the synthetic fertilizers needed to grow it at home—a huge vulnerability in a fight with the U.S. Navy the CCP is taking steps to mitigate.

Some pundits call the resulting strategy “fertilizer nationalism,” a struggle to secure the nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium needed for modern fertilizers. Those chemicals are only produced in significant quantities in Europe, the Americas, and the Middle East, and must carried by ship through vulnerable chokepoints such as the Strait of Malacca.

Enter China’s $500 billion Belt & Road Initiative, which aims to insulate the country from a naval blockade by moving crucial commodities by rail or pipeline instead of ship.

As part of this plan, the country is building vast “food corridors” through Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Since the 1990s, the CCP has poured a fortune into developing “Chinese Friendship Farms” across sub-Saharan Africa. Think neo-colonial plantations worked by black farmers and managed by Chinese overseers. In 2024, Xi pledged $51 billion for new Friendship Farms—on top of $62 billion in loans already owed to the regime continent-wide that could be refinanced into naval base agreements.

That’s what Sri Lanka did in 2017. The tiny island nation off India’s southern coast couldn’t service a $1.5 billion loan from China’s state-owned Export-Import Bank—so it cut a deal. Now China Merchants Port Holdings enjoys a 99-year lease on Sri Lanka’s second-largest deep-water port, and experts warn the People’s Liberation Army Navy may establish a military base there in the next few years.

China has already funded the development of 78 such ports in 45 other countries.

Some of these investments are enormous, according to data tracked by the American Enterprise Institute, which estimates China has invested nearly $1.6 trillion into foreign construction and development projects since 2005, one-third of which targets agriculture. And increasingly, those investments are targeting the U.S. homeland.

Whole Hog

Restoration News reviewed filings from the U.S. Agriculture Department that reveal the interests controlling the 277,000 acres of Chinese-owned farm and forest +land in the United States. Roughly half of this acreage is controlled by Smithfield Foods, a 90-year-old Virginia firm now owned by a Hong Kong company.

Smithfield controls about 25 percent of the entire pork industry in the U.S., which produces one-tenth of global pork supplies. China, in contrast, supplies nearly 50 percent of the world’s pork—and consumes even more, with pork accounting for 70 percent of all meat consumed by Chinese. (Pigs are so crucial to the historical Chinese diet that the unmodified character for “meat” commonly means “pork.”)

The takeaway is clear: the pork industry is useful for Americans, but crucial for Chinese, which is why our exports remain a billion-dollar business.

WH Group (formerly Shuanghui International Holding Ltd.) was already China’s top meat producer when it acquired Smithfield for almost $5 billion in 2013—then the largest-ever Chinese acquisition of an American company—establishing it as the world’s biggest pork producer.

Smithfield president and CEO C. Larry Pope defended the purchase before the Senate Committee on Agriculture, saying, “The Chinese government has absolutely no ownership stake or management control in Shuanghui [WH Group].” The Treasury Department approved the deal five months later.

“These are not Russian communists,” Pope assured doubters, his own mother among them. “They like Americans.”

But the agent who brokered Smithfield’s sale, Carl Sanchez, later told investigators that the state-owned Bank of China financed a $4 billion loan to buy the U.S. pork manufacturer. In its 2013 annual report, the institution boasts “the Bank successfully support WH Group Limited’s acquisition of Smithfield Foods . . . which significantly enhances the Bank’s influence in domestic and overseas markets.”

The Bank of China exclusively advances party directives such as the Belt & Road Initiative.

Wan Long, chairman and founder of WH Group, also served as a delegate to the National People’s Congress. An archived company webpage lists him as a “member of the Communist Party of China” in 2015—two years after Pope testified WH Group is unaffiliated with the CCP.

‘If You Can Look into the Seeds of Time…’

But Chinese firms don’t always need to purchase American companies to obtain competitive advantage in the global food industry. Sometimes they simply steal trade secrets. The FBI estimates Chinese intellectual property theft costs Americans between $225 and $600 billion each year.

One of its most surprising targets is one America has long dominated: Genetically modified crop seeds. In 2013, the FBI indicted six Chinese nationals for conspiring to steal trade secrets from American manufacturers. Three years later, Chinese scientist Robert Mo went to prison for stealing thousands of seed samples from Monsanto while working for Chinese corn seed conglomerate DBN. As recently as 2023, Iowa farmers accused Chinese spies of “digging up hybrid seeds” from farms to smuggle to China.

Including Monsanto, this $15 billion-per-year industry is controlled by five major producers, one of which—Switzerland’s Syngenta—is now owned by SinoChem, a Chinese state-owned enterprise whose corporate objectives align with those of CCP. Nearly one-quarter of Syngenta’s global revenues come from North American sales. SinoChem is among the top pesticide retailers in America, even marketing a “dangerous” weed-killer banned in China, paraquat.

Experts have linked Syngenta to Xinjiang Jinfengyuan Seed Industry Co., Ltd—based in Xinjiang province—which sells seeds to the state-owned Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps (XPCC).

XPCC has an ugly history. It was founded in 1954 at the direction of Mao Zedong to act as a paramilitary group under direct CCP control and staffed by the People’s Liberation Army. XPCC enforced the Cultural Revolution on ethnic minorities in Xinjiang as part of Mao’s war on the “three evils”: Separatism, religious extremism, and terrorism.

The Trump administration sanctioned XPCC in 2020 as “a parallel government . . . directly involved in implementing the surveillance, mass detention, and forced labor of Uyghurs.”

SinoChem Group, too, is directly named in a November 2020 executive order “addressing the threat from securities investments that finance Communist Chinese military companies”:

Key to the development of the [People’s Republic of China’s] military, intelligence, and other security apparatuses is the country’s large, ostensibly private economy. Through the national strategy of Military-Civil Fusion, the PRC increases the size of the country’s military-industrial complex by compelling civilian Chinese companies to support its military and intelligence activities. Those companies, though remaining ostensibly private and civilian, directly support the PRC’s military, intelligence, and security apparatuses and aid in their development and modernization.

‘Green Gold Rush’

Some threats are harder to trace, however.

Chen Tianqiao is the second-largest non-citizen owner of land in the United States. In 2015, the billionaire and CCP member purchased 200,000 acres of remote forestland in Oregon’s Klamath and Deschutes Counties. He also owns 500,000 acres of timberland in Ontario, Canada; multiple historic estates in Los Angeles and New York, including Manhattan’s Vanderbilt Mansion; and gifted $115 million to Caltech’s Institute for Neuroscience, which now bears Chen’s name.

Much of Chen’s forestland is used in commercial timberwork. But sparsely populated Klamath County is also a hotspot for the illegal drug operations plaguing all of rural southern Oregon, including black market marijuana farms with links to international crime. Law enforcement reports only hint at the extent of these underground illegal drug empires, which have skyrocketed since state Democrats legalized pot in 2014.

A 2021 bust of a Klamath Falls warehouse operating under a legal hemp license yielded $20 million in illegal marijuana. At least 28 workers were living and working on-site. A year later, police responded to a report of child abuse in Klamath County, only to discover an illegal marijuana farm that may have stolen 5 million gallons of water in the drought-prone region. (The average pot plant consumes a gallon of water each day.) In 2023, the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) arrested three people in Klamath Falls for trafficking in fentanyl, counterfeit Oxycodone, and methamphetamine.

The jackpot: Two illegal marijuana busts in 2021 totaling $120 million, one of which operated at a “potato shed” just outside Klamath Falls. Investigators linked the traffickers to Mexican drug cartels cashing in on the “green gold rush.” Investigating and arresting offenders has so far cost Oregon taxpayers more than $46 million. Yet police believe they’re only catching 15–20 percent of all illegal grow operations in southern Oregon. Many of these operations employ forced labor from illegal aliens trafficked across the Mexican border.

Experts estimate 80 percent of greenhouses in neighboring Jackson County are run illegally, increasingly by Chinese. In 2023, Oregon DEA agents confiscated 14 properties used by Chinese traffickers worth $14 million. The DEA, in fact, warned Congress last year that “Chinese and other Asian [Transnational Criminal Organizations] have taken control of the marijuana trade . . . [and] now dominate the U.S. illegal drug market at levels never seen before.” And they’re doing it with the “knowledge of, and tacit acceptance by,” the CCP.

Turning the Constitution Against Us

Republican states are fighting back. In February, Utah lawmakers forced a Chinese shell company to sell 500 acres purchased just six miles from the Tooele Army Depot, a major site for war reserve and training ammunition. State Republicans blocked a similar land sale in July 2025.

Michael Lucci’s group, State Armor, is helping states craft that legislation. While the bills vary from state to state, he recommends certain principles universal to all.

“Don’t let adversaries own anything adjacent to military installations. Prohibit them from owning or directly accessing critical infrastructure,” Lucci told me. “Generally, restrict foreign adversaries’ ownership of real property with an allowance for a primary home.”

But the closest thing to a silver bullet is a national ban.

“As always, Congress is dramatically behind in addressing the threat of CCP buying up property and sensitive assets,” Lucci added. “A national prohibition should be enacted going forward, and a special task force should be created to find threats near our critical assets and force divestiture.”

Despite 29 states passing restrictions on foreign land purchases, Chinese nationals are fighting back in court by claiming a constitutional right to American land.

In late 2025, three Chinese nationals sued Texas for illegally restricting their ability to buy or lease real estate in Waco on the grounds that the right to regulate “foreign real estate acquisitions” is “exclusively occupied by the federal government” under the U.S. Constitution—even though Congress has never passed a law claiming that purview. Their lawsuit further accused the state of racially discriminating against Chinese. Supporters blasted the law as “the Chinese Exclusion Act of 2025.”

Notably, all three plaintiffs are in the U.S. on F-1 student visas, which typically expire after five years or the length of an academic program. Yet plaintiff Peng Wang, inexplicably, has lived in the state for 16 years.

The group was represented by the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance (CALDA), created by immigration lawyers specializing in H-1B and other work visas. The group was founded in 2021 to oppose President Trump’s ban on WeChat, a messaging app owned by the Chinese firm Tencent Holdings, a company notorious for its ties to the Chinese Communist Party. Tencent routinely sends American users’ data to the Chinese Communist Party and helps the government track its citizens abroad:

“In addition, the application captures the personal and proprietary information of Chinese nationals visiting the United States, thereby allowing the Chinese Communist Party a mechanism for keeping tabs on Chinese citizens who may be enjoying the benefits of a free society for the first time in their lives . . . .

“WeChat, like TikTok, also reportedly censors content that the Chinese Communist Party deems politically sensitive and may also be used for disinformation campaigns that benefit the Chinese Communist Party.”

Joe Biden overturned the WeChat ban five months after taking office and the Justice Department agreed to pay $900,000 in legal fees to the plaintiffs. CALDA’s coalition called it “a cheerful day for [its coalition] and a good number of Chinese Americans.”

In February 2026, CALDA filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court supporting birthright citizenship. “This Court should not allow the writings of anti-Chinese racists of the late 19th century to harm the rights of Chinese and other people here in the United States today,” the group wrote.

Also worth noting: CALDA’s legal director, Justin Sadowsky, is a former trial attorney for the radical Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which the FBI has investigated for alleged ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Its founders were closely associated with the terror organization Hamas. CAIR has demanded China cease oppressing its Muslim Uyghur population; to this writer’s knowledge, CALDA has yet to comment on Uyghur forced labor camps.

The Total War You Don’t See

It’s impossible to divine these foreign landowners’ intentions. Some may even be benign. Others are not.

The hard truth is that every company and citizen in China is an espionage asset under the 2017 National Intelligence Law of the People’s Republic of China. According to the law, “everyone is responsible for state security” while Article 7 obliges “any organization or citizen” to provide cooperation or support for intelligence agencies upon request—including Chinese citizens and entities abroad. Any company may be compelled to assist with intelligence cooperation under the law, which also provides immunity for state actors engaged in intelligence operations.

Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley (R) introduced a federal bill to outlaw Chinese companies and CCP officials from buying farmland and homes nationwide last year. The GOP-controlled Senate didn’t even bring it to the floor.

Why?

The grim truth is that Communist China has been at war with the United States for a generation or longer—yet Americans are still waking up to the ugly reality that our nation is the battlefield. Washington spends a trillion dollars each year financing the military, yet remains blind to the infiltration of our homeland. Even the most insignificant land purchase can double as a military-intelligence asset if Beijing gives the order.

Many U.S. officials seem indifferent.

It used to be an article of faith that trade creates peace and the market fosters democracy. Neither of those things is actually true.

Beijing never shared the West’s goal of becoming a free democracy. While American economists excitedly drafted papers about our shared “liberal values,” China prepared for a post-American future by weaponizing our best qualities against us. Trust, openness, respect for property rights, even the Constitution—all were turned into cudgels by Communists who scorn each of them but cynically use them to China’s advantage.

And Americans gullibly played along.

The bitterest irony is that China is the product of modern American capitalism. Without the 1945 Bretton Woods agreement establishing global commerce and the might of the U.S. Navy to preserve it, China could not exist as anything but a famine-ridden, medieval backwater. China’s cheap exports still buy almost all the food on Chinese tables—even after five decades of growth and trillions of dollars in investment to make the country self-sustaining.

Yet China’s weakness remains our own. The American and Chinese economies are locked in a death embrace. A war will shatter them both, though Chinese leaders rightly worry their country’s demographic crisis may topple the CCP even if world war never comes.

We built a system so committed to the genius of American entrepreneurism that we handed our chief enemy the deed to our own fields. The market can’t tell the difference between a Canadian pension fund and a PLA-connected billionaire. It’s not too late to fix it.