Posted on 07/02/2022 9:32:37 AM PDT by george76
Chinese food manufacturer Fufeng Group bought 300 acres of land near Grand Forks, North Dakota, to set up a milling plant.
The project is located about 20 minutes from the Grand Forks Air Force Base, raising national security concerns.
...
At first glance, the largely barren, wind-swept tract of land just north of Grand Forks, North Dakota, seems to be an unlikely location for international espionage.
There’s not much on the more than 300-acre patch of prime Dakota farmland right now other than dirt and tall grasses, bordered by highways and light industrial facilities on the outskirts of the city.
The nearest neighbors include a crop production company, a truck and trailer service outfit, and Patio World, which sells landscaping supplies for suburban backyards.
But when the three North Dakotans who owned the parcels of land here sold them for millions of dollars this spring, the transaction raised alarm bells as far away as Washington, D.C.
Grand Forks Air Force Base..
That’s because the buyer of the land was a Chinese company, the Fufeng Group, based in Shandong, China, and the property is just about 20 minutes down the road from Grand Forks Air Force Base — home to some of the nation’s most sensitive military drone technology.
The base is also the home of a new space networking center, which a North Dakota senator said handles “the backbone of all U.S. military communications across the globe.”
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Now some security experts warn the Chinese corn milling plant should be stopped, because it could offer Chinese intelligence unprecedented access to the facility.
It’s an only-in-America kind of fight — pitting the property and economic rights of a community against national security warnings from high-ranking officials in the nation’s capital.
Debate over the project has roiled the small community, with emotional city council hearings, local politicians at odds with one another, and neighborhood groups gearing up to block the project.
Craig Spicer, whose trucking company borders the Chinese-held land, said he’s suspicious of the new company’s intent. “It makes me feel nervous for my grandkids,” he said. “It makes me feel nervous for my kids.”
$2.6 million sale..
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inside the Air Force, an officer circulated a memo about the project in April, casting it as a national security threat to the United States and alleging that it fits a pattern of Chinese subnational espionage campaigns using commercial economic development projects to get close to Department of Defense installations. The officer, Maj. Jeremy Fox, argued that the Fufeng project is located on a narrow geographic footprint at which passive receiving equipment could intercept sensitive drone and space-based communications to and from the base.
“Some of the most sensitive elements of Grand Forks exist with the digital uplinks and downlinks inherent with unmanned air systems and their interaction with space-based assets,” he wrote. And any such data collection “would present a costly national security risk causing grave damage to United States’ strategic advantages.”
Electronic surveillance..
Fox argued that the Air Force would have little ability to detect any electronic surveillance on drone and satellite transmissions being conducted from the Chinese property. “Passive collection of those signals would be undetectable, as the requirements to do so would merely require ordinary antennas tuned to the right collecting frequencies,” he wrote. “This introduces a grave vulnerability to our Department of Defense installations and is incredibly compromising to US National Security.”
Still, that’s not the Air Force’s official position.
...
Senate opposition..
Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D., opposes the project, despite the economic advantages it might bring to his own constituents. He said he’s suspicious of the Chinese government’s intent. “I think we grossly underappreciate how effective they are at collecting information, collecting data, using it in nefarious ways,” he said in an interview. “And so I’d just as soon not have the Chinese Communist Party doing business in my backyard.”
Both the Democratic chairman and the Republican ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee also told CNBC they are opposed to the project.
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Sen. Marco Rubio, of Florida, agrees. “It is dangerous, foolish, and shortsighted to allow the Chinese Communist Party and its proxies to purchase land near U.S. military installations
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Bill Gates is the one supposedly buying this land? Or is this a separate purchase?
If the Feds cared about feeding the population they could simply nationalize those foreign owned farmlands, and anything else not in production.
300 acres will yield a lot of dog meat.
This is going on all over the country. Wake up, America.
What kind of country lets foreign adversaries buy up their farmland, and implant millions of “immigrants” all across their nation?
Open borders and globalism will be the ultimate destroyer of America. All so liberals and even ‘conservatives’ can virtue signal about how non-racist they are.
Guess the price was finally high enough for the owners to sell. Gates or Chi-Nuh, what can you do?
Bill Gates acquired six parcels of land in Pembina County..
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4073236/posts
It does make me wonder what China’s rules are for allowing foreign entities to purchase property in the PRC.
Can American Companies buy land in China? WTF.
And have government run ‘national farms’?
Like ‘collective farms’ in the PRC & the old USSR?
As I remember those didn’t turn out so well!
Uh...NO! Gov't can't run anything.
Agree but what do you actually mean by ‘nationalizing the farms’?
Wow, China and Gates buying up land everywhere and in one State at the same time. The thoughts I have are horrendous about this.
I guess we have no National Security dos and don’ts anymore since we are now Liberal World Odor.
This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.
They usually bring in Chinese workers to work the farms
Putin must have felt pretty much the same way about his country.. He didn't seem all that thrilled when Hillary showed up with her "reset button"...
But don't worry, the gov't doesn't want more food or more people.
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