Chinese government operatives and their business allies shouldn’t be allowed to move next door to America’s nuclear missile sites like F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Cheyenne, according to U.S. Sens. Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso, Wyoming Republicans.
Lummis this week introduced legislation that would prevent any agent or business affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party from buying property adjacent to federal lands in America. Barrasso is a co-sponsor.
The bill aims to do more than halt the Chinese from spying on U.S. military installations. Lummis and Barrasso are also concerned about economic warfare including threats to the energy sector.
Oil, gas and mining companies operate on millions of acres run by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service, and nearly all that land is in the West, including Wyoming.
At Risk
“Putting America first means preventing the Chinese Communist Party from buying up western land and putting our military bases, critical energy and mineral production at risk,” Lummis told Cowboy State Daily. “The people of Wyoming know that allowing the CCP to buy up our land compromises both our national and economic security.”
U.S. Sens. Mike Crapo. R-Idaho, and Marsha Blackburn, R-Tennessee, have joined Barrasso in co-sponsoring Lummis’s measure. The bill has been referred to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee headed by Jim Risch, R-Idaho.
Barrasso cited the sensitivity of F.E. Warren AFB in his support of the legislation.
“Wyoming is the center of critical energy and mineral production for our nation,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “We are also home to F.E. Warren Air Force Base — a key part of our nation’s nuclear deterrence.
“Opening the door to the Chinese Communist Party puts our national security and domestic energy production at risk.”
Added Barrasso, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate: “The people of Wyoming and across the West work hard to protect and manage our lands productively and efficiently. We cannot allow our adversaries to buy up our land and threaten our national, economic, and energy security.”
Too Close For Comfort
In May 2024, then-President Joe Biden issued an order requiring Chinese nationals to divest real estate that was operating as a cryptocurrency mining facility one mile from F.E. Warren.
National security concerns about Chinese ownership of American land are nothing new.
In 2022, the Chinese Fufeng Group bought 370 acres of farmland that it intended to develop into a corn mill just 12 miles from Grand Forks Air Force Base in North Dakota.
In 2020, Beijing-linked business interests began building a wind farm in Texas near the Air Force’s largest pilot training base.
The U.S. Treasury Department has an agency charged with reviewing transactions that could threaten America's national security.
But some say that agency, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, is too often asleep at the wheel. Among other things, China's ownership of agriculture interests in America are seen by many as a national security threat.
