(Dmytro “Henry” Aleksandrov, Headline USA) Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis vowed on Tuesday to block Chinese Communist Party operatives from buying up property in the Sunshine State.
DeSantis said that people who are connected to the CCP have been “gobbling up land” in the U.S. and other countries in the Western Hemisphere so that China would have even more foreign influence than they already have, according to the Daily Wire. He stated that the Chinese are working with globalists to undermine the West by buying its property, one of the components of their strategy.
“When they have interests that are opposed to ours and you see how they’ve wielded their authority, especially with President Xi, who’s taken a much more Marxist turn since he’s been ruling China, [it] is not in the best interests of Florida to have the Chinese Communist Party owning farmland, owning land close to military bases,” DeSantis stated.
According to the American Enterprise Institute, China owns more than 1.2 million acres of U.S. land, which includes nearly 700,000 acres of farmland and about 500,000 acres of commercial and industrial property in California, Iowa, Nebraska and Oklahoma, among other states. In southwest Texas, about 70 miles from Laughlin Air Force base, a Chinese firm that has close CCP ties builds a massive wild farm, Foreign Policy reported in 2020.
During his visit to Bonita Springs, Fla., DeSantis also said that he doesn’t want CCP purchasing homes.
“My view is, okay, yeah, no farmland, but why would you want them buying residential developments or things like that?” he said. “I don’t want them owning subdivisions or things like that.”
DeSantis acknowledged that implementing such legislation is not going to be easy.
“The issue’s going to be if someone comes in and buys, it’s not the CCP that’s signing that,” he said. “These are holding companies. You’ve got to structure [legislation] in a way that will effectively police it. But yes, we do not need to have CCP influence in Florida’s economy.”
