Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is mulling a move to ban Chinese entities from purchasing property in the state due to the economic and security risks posed by China’s communist regime.
“If you look at the Chinese Communist Party, they’ve been very active throughout the Western Hemisphere in gobbling up land and investing in different things,” DeSantis said during a press conference on Jan. 10.
“And, you know, when they have interests that are opposed to ours, and you’ve seen how they’ve wielded their authority… it is not in the best interests of Florida to have the Chinese Communist Party owning farmland, owning land close to military bases.”
The remarks follow warnings from security experts and lawmakers that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which rules China as a single-party state, is seeking to purchase strategic parcels of land throughout the United States from which it can conduct espionage or otherwise sabotage U.S. national security interests.
In recent years, Chinese land buys in Texas and North Dakota, which were both situated near U.S. military bases, have raised alarm among both locals and policymakers in state and federal governments.
DeSantis said that the CCP had “taken a much more Marxist-Leninist turn” under current Party leader Xi Jinping and suggested that communist China was now a “hostile nation.”
“We do not need to have CCP influence in Florida’s economy,” DeSantis said.
China Spending Billions on US Land Every Year
Chinese investors purchased more than $6 billion in U.S. real estate between March 2021 and March 2022, according to the National Association of Realtors, making it the largest foreign buyer in terms of dollars spent.
Florida has been at the center of that purchasing craze, with 24 percent of all foreign property purchases in the nation happening there. The next state with the highest amount of foreign purchases was California, which accounted for 11 percent.
Video Transcript
Reporter: Can yo talk about how your administration is looking into not only banning China from buying farmland but any Florida property?
Governor Ron DeSantis: So, my view on the, our economy, in Florida is, you know, we don’t want to have holdings by hostile nations. And so if you look at the Chinese Communist Party, they’ve been very active throughout the Western hemisphere in gobbling up land and investing in different things. And, you know, when, when they have interests that are opposed to ours and you see how they wielded their authority, and especially with President XI, who’s taking a much more Marxist Leninist turn since he’s been ruling China, that is not in the best interest of Florida to have the Chinese Communist Party owning farmland, owning land close to military bases. But, you know, my view is, and I think that there’s a broad agreement in those two, but my view is, okay, yeah, no Farmland, but why would you want them buying residential developments or things like that. I don’t want them owning subdivisions and things like that. I think that the issue is just going to be, I think people agree with that, the issue is going to be, yeah, obviously, if someone comes in and buys it’s not the CCP that’s signing that, these are holding companies and all that, so you’ve got to structure that in a way that will effectively police it. But, yes we do not need to have CCP influence in Florida’s economy.
We’ve already taken steps, we banned the Confucius institutes from our universities and our state colleges which they have used those Confucius institutes across the country to basically bring propaganda into our universities. As if our universities don’t have enough problems already. So, you do that. And, and so I think that that’s something that that’s been very good. We’ve also done things to limit their ability to fund research in our, in our universities. I think we’re going to go even further than that, the legislature only went so far a couple years ago. I think there’s an appetite to do even more because they’re influence in our society has been very insidious. If you look [they’re] very powerful in entertainment. They’re very powerful in finance. I mean, you know you will have some of these, Disney, you know, they will, they will change things to be able to placate the CCP. Wall Street will bend to placate to CCP. But it’s a larger issue and we’re just one, yes, we are we are pretty big fish now, I mean, I think, we have the 13th or 14th biggest economy in the world if we were our own country in Florida, so, you know we’re a force to be reckoned with.
But, you know, from the broader US economy, we’re way too intertwined with China economically and it hurts us. It hurts our economic vitality, it hurts our security. I mean, when COVID hit, people needed all these supplies, I think like 100% of it was made in China. Why would you want a hostile nation, to rely on a hostile nation for things that are integral for our quality of life and security? Of course, you wouldn’t want to do that. But this has been going on for for many, many decades, so disentangling from China, I think, is something that’s very, very significant going forward.
And you know you’re . . . and you’re not going to see people acknowledging that. You know there, they do this thing in Davos, they’re doing it next week. All these Elites come in, you know, the World Economic Forum, and basically, you know, their vision is they run everything and everybody else is just like a serf, like a peasant. They say they’re going after energy, ESG, all these other things. And you see the Biden Administration once the nix gas stoves. Are you kidding me. Like we need, I want gas stoves. Imagine like you, people had the hurricane come through, didn’t have power right away but we’re able to turn on some stove. So you cannot go down this road, but that’s exactly what they want to do, and it’s really weakening Western Society, Western values, but underlying a lot of that is the CCP. You know those people are there, they’re elites, but you know Xi is really, is really kind of the the puppet behind the curtain on a lot of this stuff. So very, very problematic, I think, in the direction they want to go. And what I’ve said in Florida is, is that type of stuff coming out of Davos, those policies, are dead on arrival in the state of Florida.
