Sweeney: China doesn’t own as much U.S. land as some think

In response to Ms. Beverly Monahan’s Opinion concerning President Joe Biden, I once again find myself correcting her obvious bias about the Biden administration (“U.S. must stop bending down to adversaries"). The facts are that the Chinese government owns less than 1% of all land that is owned by any foreign government. It took me about 20 seconds to find those facts in a Google search. In the last two years, less than 1,400 acres of all farmland has been bought by Chinese interests, bringing ownership to a total of three-hundredths of 1% of the 1.3 billion acres of farmland in the United States. Smithfield Foods, an American company bought by a Chinese firm in 2013, reports that, in 2022 and 2023, it only purchased 186 acres. I am not advocating for allowing the Chinese government to willy-nilly buy land in the United States, let alone around sensitive installations. But let’s be clear: There is not a mass sale of American land to Chinese interests at such a level to cause such an outcry of concern. Just as Donald Trump’s Muslim ban was deemed unconstitutional, so is the Florida ban to Chinese ownership of land. And it is just the one state, not “U.S. states,” as Ms. Monahan claims.

The country that owns the most land in the United States, you might ask? Canada!

George “Jody” Sweeney

Wyoming

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