Grand Forks, Fufeng to be featured in hour-long NewsNation special Sunday night

GRAND FORKS — A Grand Forks issue will be among those featured Sunday night, June 25, in an hour-long NewsNation special, “Made in America, Property of China.”

The special, hosted by Brian Entin, will explore rural communities across the nation that are fighting to keep Chinese-owned companies from buying and building on U.S. soil. It will focus primarily on Green Charter Township, a town outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, where a Chinese-owned company called Gotion is set to break ground on a battery plant in July.

But Grand Forks residents will recognize familiar faces and locales as well. Reporting for the documentary began in Grand Forks, Entin told the Herald.

In November 2021, city leaders announced that Fufeng Group, a company with ownership in China, had chosen Grand Forks as its location for a wet corn mill. It was thought to be the largest private capital investment in the region’s history.

Over the course of the next 14 months, the proposed mill was discussed by city leaders but fiercely debated, as some in the community were concerned about the mill’s ownership ties to China, its impact on the environment and the possibility that it could be a threat to nearby Grand Forks Air Force Base.

The project eventually was dropped by the city after the Air Force confirmed it would be a security threat.

“(Fufeng) was the first story like this that I’ve covered, which kind of inspired the special we’re working on for NewsNation on Sunday night,” Entin told the Herald. “I mean, this isn’t like something that I’ve covered in the past. We just kind of went (to Grand Forks) on a whim. I read the

New York Times story

, and that’s what inspired us to go to five more states and do similar stories, because I was so interested in how the regular, everyday American citizens in Grand Forks were able to organize and actually fight this massive company, and actually win in the end.”

Entin and the NewsNation team spent four days in Grand Forks in February, attending the meeting

where City Council members voted to stop the Fufeng project

, interviewing local officials and following leaders of the grassroots anti-Fufeng effort.

To Entin, it’s clear it’s a story worth telling.

“I feel like this topic really does go unnoticed. For a lot of Americans, they don’t even realize that it’s happening,” he said. “These Chinese-connected companies are coming into small towns in the Midwest and throughout America and rural communities, close to military bases, oftentimes, just like in Grand Forks. And no one’s really doing anything about it.”

“Made in America, Property of China” will air on NewsNation at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. central time Sunday. The documentary will also be available to stream on Hulu and YouTubeTV.

Hannah Shirley is the managing editor for the Grand Forks Herald. Shirley previously covered cops and courts for the Herald. They are a 2018 graduate of the University of Idaho, and prior to working for the Herald worked as a reporter for the Berkshire Record in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Shirley can be reached at hshirley@gfherald.com.