Dr. Phil McGraw, a daytime TV personality, showed former President Donald Trump a map that showed all the farmland that Chinese companies connected to the Beijing government had bought and strategically placed close to American military installations.
McGraw, who sat down with Trump for a lengthy interview in July—before President Joe Biden decided to drop his reelection bid and essentially anoint Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor—began the segment by revealing dozens of Chinese farmland purchases around highly sensitive military installations from coast to coast.
“They’re surrounding our military bases. We’ve allowed that to take place,” McGraw said. “You may come in and inherit all of this, and it may get worse.”
Trump responded by noting that while it’s good to allow foreign investment in the U.S., he said “that’s a lot of land” that’s been purchased, adding it was also “a lot of activity around those nuclear sites, to put it mildly.”
The New York Post, in an exclusive report this week, noted the scope of the problem:
China has been buying up strategically placed farmland next to military installations across the US, raising national security fears over potential espionage or even sabotage.
The Post has identified 19 bases across the US from Florida to Hawaii which are in close proximity to land bought up by Chinese entities and could be exploited by spies working for the communist nation.
They include some of the military’s most strategically important bases: Fort Liberty (formerly Fort Bragg) in Fayetteville, North Carolina; Fort Cavazos (formerly Fort Hood) in Killeen, Texas; Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton in San Diego, California, and MacDill air force base in Tampa, Florida.
Robert S. Spalding III, a retired United States Air Force brigadier general whose work centers on US-China relations, told The Post: “It is concerning due to the proximity to strategic locations.”
He added: “These locations can be used to set up intelligence collection sites and the owners can be influential in local politics as we have seen in the past. It is alarming we do not have laws on the books that would prevent the Chinese from buying property in the U.S.”
Under the pretense of farming, Chinese landowners could establish reconnaissance sites, deploy tracking technology, and use radar and infrared scanning to monitor military bases or attempt to fly drones over them, sources told The Post.
A September 2023 report in the Wall Street Journal revealed that Chinese intruders have attempted to breach military facilities over 100 times in recent years. Incidents included attempts to enter a missile range in New Mexico and sightings of scuba divers near a government rocket launch site in Florida.
The threat the Chinese government poses to America is huge, with the FBI labeling it a “grave threat.” Director Christopher Wray said in April hackers have gained access to critical U.S. infrastructure and are waiting “for just the right moment to deal a devastating blow” and “physically wreak havoc.”
The Department of Homeland Security has also raised concerns about the potential for Chinese spies infiltrating the U.S. Southern border, blending in with the more than 30,000 who have been admitted since October of last year. Those spies will likely “employ economic espionage” and “seek to illicitly acquire our technologies and intellectual property” according to DHS’s Homeland Threat Assessment 2024, though President Joe Biden has not changed his border policies and Vice President Kamala Harris, appointed by Biden to lessen illegal crossings, has similarly offered no solutions.
Morgan Lerette, a former contractor for the private military company Blackwater, is raising the alarm.
“The Chinese are, or will, use this farmland to learn more about US military capabilities, movements, and technology,” Lerette told The Post.
“This will allow them to better understand how to transition their military from a defensive strategy to an expeditionary one,” he noted further, adding they’ll figure out “how to move forces quickly for conflicts such as taking Taiwan and how and when US forces would respond to their incursions based on troop movement at these bases.”
