Beware Greeks bearing gifts, according to an old saying.
It’s a reference to the legend of the Trojan Horse, a giant structure left outside the walls of Troy after the Greek army departed following a decade-long siege. The Trojans dragged it inside and celebrated, unaware the wooden horse was filled with armed and experienced Greek warriors. The warriors emerged during the night, opened the gates for their fellow soldiers and Troy was put to the sword and set ablaze.
Such a tale seems meaningless today, almost silly, according to Michael Quinn Sullivan, publisher of Texas Scorecard and host of “Exposed,” a serial podcast. Season three is titled “The Chinese Infiltration of Texas,” and issues the warning the Trojans failed to heed.
“Americans in general, and Texans specifically, have been rightly fixated on the crisis our southern border, an invasion of tens of thousands of people illegally flooding into our nation every week,” Sullivan said in Episode 1. “But we failed to recognize an insidious infiltration occurring under our noses for the last two decades. Directly and indirectly, the Communist Chinese government and its surrogates have been grabbing a bigger and bigger share of the Lone Star State.
“They own tens of thousands of acres of land," he added. "They're digging into the state’s research institutions, our universities and even our public schools. They’re manipulating businesses and, yes, even our politics. And the worst part, we’re letting it happen.”
Sullivan noted that the Texas Scorecard investigative team has been researching and exposing what was thought to be “whispers and rumors,” that the Communist Chinese government has been worming its way into Texas and the United States.
“What we found is an infiltration, not an invasion,” he said. “In some cases, the Communist Chinese government admits to their actions and intentions. In others we have found they have carefully constructed a façade of organizations and entities to hide themselves from discovery. Typically, their Trojan horse of choice to gain access to our networks and infrastructure would be made of money, not wood.”
Part of the attraction is the outsize role Texas plays in the United States, Sullivan explained.
“Texas is the second-largest state in the union, but it has an even larger presence in the minds and mythology of the United States," he said. "When traveling overseas few people can name our individual states. But everyone knows Texas. Our size and our swagger and land have made us the embodiment of the American Dream. And it’s probably why the Communist Chinese government has targeted Texas, literally buying up our land.
"China has been buying massive swaths of land in the petroleum-rich basins of West Texas, areas adjacent to the border, and perhaps more disturbingly, alongside military installations,” he added.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller believes this matter should be of grave concern and he sees it as a national security concern.
“We don’t need to give them listening capabilities to our aircraft coming in and out and other communication coming out of those military installations. It’s just crazy,” Miller said. “It’s crazy enough just to allow our biggest enemy to be purchasing our own soil.”
Sullivan said this isn’t just a Texas problem. China is buying up land around the country. Data from the United States Department of Agriculture in 2020 reported China holding only 352,000 acres of U.S. agricultural land, slightly less than 1% of foreign-held acres.
“But tracking these transactions is imperfect. It’s likely that China’s ownership of land in the U.S. is vastly understated in these reports,” he said. “Since 2015, according to reports required under the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act, foreign holdings have increased by an average of nearly 2.2 million acres, ranging from 800,000 acres to 3.3 million acres per year. Of this increase, most of the purchases are forest, crop and pasture lands.”
According to USDA documents, approximately 4.7 million acres of Texas agricultural land is owned by foreign entities.
In 1978 the Agricultural Foreign Investment Disclosure Act (AFIDA) became law. It was enacted to track the information related to foreign ownership in U.S. agricultural land. It requires foreign entities who acquire, transfer or hold an interest in U.S. agricultural land to report such holdings and transactions to the Secretary of Agriculture on an AFIDA report form FSA-153.
Failing to report foreign ownership is penalized up to 25% of the fair market value of the land but USDA enforcement is lacking. The last fine was administered in 2014.
Foreign landowners are able to get around laws requiring the reporting of land to state and national agencies by shifting property into majority U.S.-owned subsidiaries. Texas does not prevent foreign ownership of the state’s agricultural land.
With the ongoing war in Ukraine, Europe’s breadbasket, agricultural independent is gaining deserved attention, Sullivan said.
He pointed to Smithfield Foods, acquired in 2013 by the China-based company Shanghai, which changed its name to the WH Group, the largest meat processor in China. With the acquisition of Smithfield, it became the largest hog producer in the U.S.
“PBS NewsHour,” in a 2014 report, said the Smithfield purchase had been orchestrated by the Chinese government. That became even more significant in 2020 when meat-processing plants were shuttered across the U.S. in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Grocery store shelves were emptied and meat prices spiked.
Smithfield, which has operations in Texas, lobbied the federal government to keep their plants running. That meant China controlled a major part of the American food supply, with money flowing into CCP coffers.
Miller and others wonder why Americans and Texans are so willing to give up their land to the Chinese.
“It’s just crazy," he said. "Why do we do that? We're just greedy. We want Toyota, BMW and those to come in and build plants and employ Americans. But we want to partner with them. They need to partner with us, not just wholesale, get them carte blanche access to America.”
But, Sullivan said, for the Chinese government, partnership only flows in one direction. That’s a story that “Exposed” will continue to follow.
China has also disrupted the pecan market, he said. The U.S. is the leading pecan grower in the world, and Texas ranks among the top producing states, intermittently swapping the top spot with Georgia or New Mexico, depending on weather conditions and output.
Between 2012 and 2013, there was a 64% jump in American pecan exports to Hong Kong.
“The nut market in China is 500 million tons and we only produce 300, so they buy everything we got,” Miller said. “It’s one of the few commodities that have remained consistent. They’re a good market for grain sorghum. We send a lot of grain sorghum over there, cotton, other Texas products. We want their money but we just don’t want them over here snooping around.”
That’s another element this podcast is exploring.
U.S. Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) of Terrell, is a member of the House Committee on Financial Services.
“I'm not against all things Chinese. I realize that there is a reasonable need that can be fulfilled at times with doing business with the Chinese,” Gooden said. “But to just give them the access that we have given them to our daily lives, to our borders, to our military, it's something that I think needs more oversight. I think it needs some reining in.”
Sun Guangxin, a Chinese billionaire, began acquiring land to develop a wind turbine farm in South Texas in 2013, eventually owning around 140,000 acres in Val Verde, roughly 7% of all land in the county.
Guangxin is a retired Chinese People’s Liberation Army general who reportedly built his fortune by establishing close ties to Communist Party officials and leveraging those connections to cheaply acquire and redevelop government property to become a real estate tycoon.
Sullivan said while Texas lawmakers push for more “unreliable green energy sources,” the wind farm has added solar. This makes the Texas power grid dependent on a front man for the Chinese government, he said.
Texas businessman Kyle Bass, a founding member of a group called the Committee on the Present Danger: China, said he is concerned how this company was set up. A Delaware corporation called C-H America was funded with dollars from a CCP-owned institution in America.
“You basically had a U.S. corporation funded with U.S. dollars buying U.S. property,” Bass said. “It was really difficult to understand who the actual owner was and what kind of sovereignty was represented there.”
The reason so many eyebrows are being raised is that Laughlin Air Force Base is very close to this development. Bass says the CCP’s goal is surveillance.
“Basically they call it over-the-horizon mapping,” he said. “But if you get the point higher and higher, you can map more and more, you can increase the linear distance that you can map with the new ability to map things that fly by, walk by or drive by, they can map things within one inch of space of specificity and clarity, of things that are 50 miles away from 700 feet.
"What's interesting about that is Laughlin Air Force Base is 30 miles away and the restricted airspace is 10 miles away from the main ranch,” he added.
In August 2021, state Rep. James White (R-Woodville), who is no longer in the Legislature, filed legislation which would prohibit any foreign, individual, government or business from purchasing or acquiring a title to agricultural land in Texas.
“Definitely, when it comes to agriculture, some states have already done this,” said White, a retired Army officer who worked as a teacher and rancher before entering politics. His bill didn’t make much headway in Austin, but he remains aware of the potential impacts of Chinese investments in Texas.
“This idea of people coming in and buying a prime agriculture is not only a national security issue, it’s handicapping our younger Texans that want to be in agriculture," he said. "Because you’re talking about the Chinese Communist Party, right. They have the wealth of an entire country to bid up these property prices. The young farmers … they can’t compete financially.”
The series will continue with an exploration of how China has been infiltrating Texas schools and universities and being given control over curriculum in the classrooms. The series is based on the original Texas Scorecard reporting of Robert Montoya, Darrell Frost, Emily Wilkerson, Kristen Cianci and Jessie Connor.
