The line against Beijing is drawn in Little Rock.

“We are taking a strong stand against China infiltrating our state,” says Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “We’re going to continue to push back.”

Arkansas is the first state in the nation that forced a Chinese-connected company to divest farmland, and now says it is taking additional action against the CCP.

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Sanders is introducing new legislation that adds further measures to stop China state-owned businesses from operating in her state and shut down programs sponsored by China.

The measures include banning CCP-linked companies from buying or leasing property, blocking ownership near critical infrastructure sites, scraping Sister City partnerships and cutting funding for universities and colleges that have Chinese-funded programs.

“We’ve seen a number of cases where China is trying to infiltrate things that matter to our critical infrastructure, buying up land around our military bases, our substations. These are things that we’re taking strong action against here in Arkansas, expanding existing legislation so that we can continue to hold their feet to the fire and push them out,” says Sanders.

In 2023, the state ordered Syngenta Seeds, whose parent company is a Chinese conglomerate, to divest farmland used for seed production. 

The company said that “the suggestion that China is using Syngenta to purchase land or conduct operations for any purpose other than supporting the company’s commercial business in North America is simply false.”  But the state fined the company $280,000 for not initially disclosing its foreign ownership by the deadline.

“Syngenta is foreign-owned — ultimately by the Chinese Communist Party,” said Arkansas Attorney General Tim Miller in announcing the penalty.

“This serves as a warning to all other Chinese state-owned companies operating in Arkansas.”

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“Agriculture is the number one industry here in the state of Arkansas and so protecting our agricultural security and protecting the components that make it so strong, are one of the things that are really important,” says Sanders.

Two other firms are being investigated for possible ties to China, but in December a Federal Judge issued a preliminary injunction to halt the probe of one of them.  

At least 22 states have enacted some form of restrictions on Chinese-owned companies.

“The CCP has aggressive intent and has become more aggressive and threatening, both at home as well as abroad, and we need to be aware of these threats,” says Congressman John Moolenaar, (R) Michigan, Chairman of House Select Committee on the CCP.  He says more states should follow Sanders’ lead.

“She is taking a leadership role and protecting farmland and green spaces in Arkansas and making sure the CCP doesn’t gain a foothold in Arkansas. We want to see more states taking this kind of action,” he says.

For several years, officials have been warning about China’s entry into the U.S., through businesses and other organizations that they say pose a national security threat.

Michael Pillsbury, a former top U.S. government official on China matters and Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, has been sounding the alarm. He authored “The One Hundred Year Marathon, China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower” a decade ago and says not much has changed since then.

“What Governor Sanders is launching is pretty important,” he says, “part of building the long-term foundation to protect ourselves against the CCP, but it is not the end of the story unless she is successful in persuading Homeland Security and the FBI to make this a federal issue.”

“The state of Arkansas doesn’t have a CIA or FBI to do this. The intelligence collection that triggers the alarm is what the federal government has to do.”

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Experts say it can be difficult to determine if a company is really owned by a Chinese firm, which is part of the CCP’s strategy.

“There really is no such thing as a private company in China,” says Rep. Moolenaar. “All the companies are affiliated in some way and directed in some way by the Chinese Communist Party. And secondly, it is important to note that they have something called military fusion, where technologies, even in the civil area, are used for military purposes.”

He says Chinese-funded programs that operate under the guise of educational programs also serve to further the CCP’s interests, which is one target of Sanders’ push. Moolenaar points to a recent case in his state of Michigan that raised alarms.

“The Chinese Communist Party will leverage people,” he says. “Five Chinese national students were caught spying at Camp Grayling. Camp Grayling is a military facility, where according to public reports, we train military leaders, including Taiwanese military leaders. So when you consider the threat of the leverage of the Chinese Communist Party, we need to be vigilant and protect American universities and American taxpayer dollars.”

The five Chinese students were charged last fall with lying to the FBI after they claimed to be observing meteor showers at midnight at the base, but instead were found to have taken photos of the installation.  The FBI said all five  graduated last spring from the University of Michigan, and were part of a joint program between the university and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Shanghai, China.

This is exactly the type of suspicious scenario Sanders is trying to address.

“We know that so often China is looking for any way possible into and developing a relationship for the purpose of exploiting it, and for the purpose of taking that information back and using it against us,” she says. “We want to make sure that we are protecting against that.”

China’s embassy in Washington has accused the U.S. of “politicizing and weaponizing economic and trade issues.” Embassy spokesman Liu Pengyu says U.S. officials “deliberately obstruct normal economic and trade exchange for (a) political agenda.”

But critics charge that is exactly what the CCP is doing under the guise of commerce and friendship.

“We need to be proactive,” warns Rep. Moolenaar. “We need to not so much look for a smoking gun, we need to look for a loaded gun that is actually a threat to America.”