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There was a time when Kim Reynolds, the governor of Iowa, had no problem with Chinese investment. In 2012, when she was the state’s lieutenant governor, she met Xi Jinping, then China’s vice-premier, on a visit to Beijing. In 2017, as governor, she visited again, this time posing with Vice-Premier Wang Yang. No longer. In her Condition of the State address to Iowa’s legislature on January 9th, Ms Reynolds claimed that “China continues to grow more aggressive, and buying American land has been one of the many ways they have waged this new battle.” Later this year she intends to introduce a new law that would toughen land-ownership reporting rules in Iowa. “American farmland should stay in American hands,” she says.
Ms Reynolds joins a chorus of state and federal politicians who worry about Chinese land grabs. On January 2nd Missouri’s governor, Mike Parson, issued an executive order banning “foreign adversaries” from buying land within ten miles of a military facility. Last October Arkansas ordered a Chinese-owned agricultural firm to sell 160 acres of land. Laws to restrict Chinese ownership of land have spread to Florida and Texas. In recent years the number of states with restrictions on foreign ownership has grown from 14 to 24, according to Micah Brown, of the National Agricultural Law Centre in Arkansas. Federal politicians are getting in on the act, too. Jon Tester, the Democratic senator from Montana, is among those to have proposed tighter federal laws on foreign land ownership.
Yet there is little reason to think that Chinese firms are really buying much American land—whether near military bases or otherwise. If official data are to be believed, Chinese landholdings are both tiny and shrinking. Chinese investment into America has collapsed in the past few years. Is it all a storm about nothing?
Since 1978 foreign owners of agricultural land have been required to declare it to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA). The agency’s data show that, at the end of 2022, around 3% of privately held land nationwide was declared foreign-owned. The biggest holders were firms and individuals from Canada, followed by the Netherlands and Britain. Declared Chinese entities held less than 1% of all foreign-owned land, or 0.03% of the total. People in Luxembourg own more. Foreign land ownership has grown by 40% since 2016, but China is not evidently the driver. From 2021 to 2022 the total amount of land owned in full or in part by Chinese firms shrank from 384,000 acres to 347,000. In Iowa, Chinese holdings totalled just 281 acres—an area smaller than the state fairgrounds in Des Moines.
So why the panic? Mr Brown says that the surge of lawmaking is driven by a change in the political climate, caused by two relatively high-profile incidents of Chinese land purchases near military bases. One was for a grain-milling plant in North Dakota, a few miles away from Grand Forks Air Force Base. The other was land purchased to build a wind farm in southern Texas, near Laughlin Air Force base. Those, combined with the shooting down of a Chinese spy balloon last year, meant that: “Nobody wanted to stand up against restricting [Chinese] purchases of land,” says Mr Brown. Politicians of various stripes have suggested that the Chinese either want to spy, or to control America’s food supply, or both.
The patchiness of official data does not help. That 281 acres in Iowa is owned by Syngenta, an agricultural-science firm. The firm was purchased outright by ChemChina, a state-owned chemicals firm, in 2017. But until 2021 the land was listed as Swiss-owned in the USDA records—as were several other Syngenta sites. Late last year, tax records revealed that Chen Tianqiao, a Chinese billionaire with past links to the Communist Party, who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, owns almost 200,000 acres of forestry land in Oregon, which was not declared as foreign-owned. (Mr Chen’s firm now says that, following media questions, it has submitted the relevant USDA filings.) A review by the Government Accountability Office published on January 18th found that the Treasury and Defence departments need timelier and more accurate data to judge security risks.
Still, it is unlikely that data gaps hide a surge of secret Chinese purchases. Overall Chinese investment into America peaked in 2016, and has fallen off a cliff since the pandemic, says Derek Scissors, who maintains a database of Chinese foreign investment for the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank. What investment is continuing is generally confined to the supply chain for electric vehicles. The flood of Chinese land purchases that began a decade or so ago was more to do with wealthy Chinese people trying to get their money out of China than about spying, according to Mr Scissors. The new laws are a bit like ones “preventing snow emergencies in Florida”, he says. That is to say, pointless.
From California to the New York island
Some politicians are frustrated with the endless focus on land. Raja Krishnamoorthi, a Democratic congressman who is the ranking member of the House select committee on China, admits that enforcement of filing requirements for USDA’s database is “pretty lax”. But some laws intended to stop any Chinese-origin individuals buying any land at all, such as one passed in Florida last year that restricted even residential-property purchases, drift into “outright racism and xenophobia”, he complains. He wishes politicians would focus more on improving American competitiveness in general. Sadly that is harder than blustering about farmland. ■
Correction (January 23rd 2024): This article was updated to note that Chen Tianqiao no longer has links to the Chinese Communist Party.
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The European Union is preparing further countermeasures against U.S. tariffs if negotiations fail, according to European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
U.S. President Donald Trump had imposed 20% tariffs on the bloc on Wednesday.
Von der Leyen’s comments come after retaliatory duties were announced by the bloc after the U.S. imposed tariffs on last month in a bid to protect European workers and consumers. The EU at the time said it would introduce counter-tariffs on 26 billion euros ($28 billion) worth of U.S. goods.
Industrial-grade steel and aluminum, other steel and aluminum semi-finished and finished products, along with their derivative commercial products, such as machinery parts and knitting needles were set to be included. A range of other products such as bourbon, agricultural products, leather goods, home appliances and more were also on the EU’s list.
Following a postponement, these tariffs are expected to come into effect around the middle of April.
This is a developing story, please check back for updates.
Attendees check in during a job fair at the YMCA Gerard Carter Center on March 27, 2025 in the Stapleton Heights neighborhood of the Staten Island borough in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Private payroll gains were stronger than expected in March, countering fears that the labor market and economy are slowing, according to a report Wednesday from ADP.
Companies added 155,000 jobs for the month, a sharp increase from the upwardly revised 84,000 in February and better than the Dow Jones consensus forecast for 120,000, the payrolls processing firm said.
Hiring was fairly broad based, with professional and business services adding 57,000 workers while financial activities grew by 38,000 as tax season heats up. Manufacturing contributed 21,000 and leisure and hospitality added 17,000.
Service providers were responsible for 132,000 of the positions. On the downside, trade, transportation and utilities saw a loss of 6,000 jobs and natural resources and mining declined by 3,000.
On the wage side, earnings rose by 4.6% year over year for those staying in their positions and 6.5% for job changers. The gap between the two matched a series low last hit in September, suggesting a lower level of mobility for workers wanting to switch jobs.
Still, the overall numbers indicate a solid labor market. Recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicates that the level of open positions is now almost even with available workers, reversing a trend in which openings outnumbered the unemployed by 2 to 1 a couple years ago.
The ADP report comes ahead of the more closely watched BLS measure of nonfarm payrolls. The BLS report, which unlike ADP includes government jobs, is expected to show payroll growth of 140,000 in March, down slightly from 151,000 in February. The two counts sometimes show substantial disparities due to different methodologies.
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The U.S. government is set to increase tariff rates on several categories of imported products. Some economists tracking these trade proposals say the higher tariff rates could lead to higher consumer prices.
One model constructed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston suggests that in an “extreme” scenario, heightened taxes on U.S. imports could result in a 1.4 percentage point to 2.2 percentage point increase to core inflation. This scenario assumes 60% tariff rates on Chinese imports and 10% tariff rates on imports from all other countries.
Price increases could come across many categories, including new housing and automobiles, alongside consumer services such as nursing, public transportation and finance.
“People might think, ‘Oh, tariffs can only affect the goods that I buy. It can’t affect the services,'” said Hillary Stein, an economist at the Boston Fed. “Those hospitals are buying inputs that might be, for example, … medical equipment that comes from abroad.”
White House economists say tariffs will not meaningfully contribute to inflation. In a statement to CNBC, Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, said that “as the world’s largest source of consumer demand, the U.S. holds all the leverage, which means foreign suppliers will have to eat the economic burden or ‘incidence’ of the tariffs.”
Assessing the impact of the administration’s full economic agenda has been a challenge for central bank leaders. The Federal Open Market Committee decided to leave its target for the federal funds rate unchanged at the meeting in March.
“There is a reason why companies went outside of the U.S.,” said Gregor Hirt, chief investment officer at Allianz Global Investors. “Most of the time it was because it was cheaper and more productive.”
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