House Republicans warned top Biden Cabinet secretaries about the “alarming” effort by a Chinese government-linked company to buy a large plot of land miles from a crucial military drone base in North Dakota.
Fufeng Group, a huge agricultural company with significant links to China’s government, purchased 370 acres as a location for its new wet corn mill in the agribusiness park just a short distance from Grand Forks Air Force Base. Republicans have slammed the land grab as an “alarming development” for national security.
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“The presence of a Chinese Communist Party-affiliated corporation near a military installation potentially undermines the integrity of our high-capability military bases, jeopardizing our strategic interests,” Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-FL) and fifty House GOP colleagues said in a Tuesday letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack.
CONCERNS RAISED ABOUT CHINESE LAND PURCHASE NEAR U.S. DRONE SITE
The Republicans added that “acquisitions of this magnitude pose a threat not only to our national security but also to our food security” and advocated adding the Department of Agriculture to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, an interagency group that reviews the national security implications of foreign investments.
The Grand Forks base is one of the key locations for the RQ-4 Global Hawk drone, a “remotely piloted aircraft with intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities” used by the United States around the world.
When the sale was announced earlier this year, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, also a Republican, told the Grand Forks Herald that “with Fufeng in Grand Forks, it will be North Dakota — not China — that reaps the benefits of the jobs, facilities, economic activity and tax revenue.”
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“We appreciate and share the concerns raised by our U.S. senators, who have access to national security briefings and information not available to local and state officials,” Burgum said in late August after speaking with Cramer and Hoeven. “We also appreciate that this is a local decision and understand and respect city leaders’ desire to wait for the official federal review to be completed to identify potential or specific national security implications.”
