Tone down the fearmongering about China’s supposed threat to Kansas farms | Opinion

xenophobe. n. a person contemptuous of people from different countries.

factitious. adj. lacking authenticity or genuineness; sham.

As in: On July 8, Trump administration xenophobes announced a factitious assessment of the effects of Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland.

See: The National Farm Security Action Plan.

One-tenth of 1% — 0.1%. If every acre of Chinese-owned crop land in the United States were planted with wheat, it would yield only one-tenth of 1% of the Wheat State’s harvest this year. If the farmers — virtually all Americans — who farm that land planted it with soybeans, it would amount to just 16-hundredths of 1% — 0.16% — of the 230.46 million bushels of the Missouri bean harvest.

U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke L. Rollins claims Chinese ownership of American farmland “expose(s) us to risks of shortages” and threatens “American abundance.”

The crops harvested from that land is minuscule. And it’s not secreted away. American workers process it in U.S. mills and crushers, and feed it in U.S. feed lots. Some probably even makes its way to China, thanks to American rail and dock workers — exports that American farm state politicians ceaselessly champion. Most Chinese-owned farmland in this country is dedicated to renewable energy, generating electricity for American farms, factories and cities.

Kansas farmers earn more than $4 billion annually selling to China. It must have jarred them when their Sen. Roger Marshall, standing next to Rollins as she announced the plan, chastised one of their best customers: “China, get the hell out of American agriculture.”

Shortages, American abundance threatened? That’s hyperbole built on misleading assertions and untruths. It’s a threat, a danger and in line with the Trump administration’s so-called “America first” philosophy. Maybe that’s the point.

Rollins said the administration is taking “executive action to ban the purchase of American farmland by Chinese nationals.” It’s not.

Trump budget dropped USDA reforms

The plan merely tweaks a more than four-decades-old record keeping system the USDA maintains, tracking all foreign purchases of U.S. cropland. The tweak allows online reporting of such transactions — recordkeeping, meet internet. The administration didn’t push for reforms to the system Congress proposed in its farm bill. They were dropped from the budget bill the president signed.

Chinese investors own just two-hundredths of 1%, 0.02%, of all American farmland. Missouri ranks third, at 42,000 acres. Ninety-nine percent of that is held by one owner, the company that bought Smithfield Farms acquired the acreage in the transaction. Chinese interests own only one acre of Kansas farmland — one.

Surely the secretary knows the share of U.S. cropland in Chinese hands is paltry, and that since peaking in 2021, Chinese ownership has dropped 27%.

And she must know also that her recommendations are contradicted by her own actions? The plan says the USDA will fund avian flu research. The administration fired 25% of those scientists. Biosecurity is one its priorities, yet Rollins cut at least 28 of the researchers at the National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility at Kansas State University.

If Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland were really a dire threat to national security, does the administration intend to prosecute American citizens who abetted that threat when they sold land to Chinese investors?

In an administration of inconsistencies and policymaking chaos — continually threatening and then changing tariff rates, for example — there is one constant: An across-the-board assault on the other, everyone and anything outside Western American northern European orthodoxy.

The National Farm Security Action Plan is another front. It’s built on rhetoric from Trump’s first term, his frequent referrals to the pandemic as the “China virus” and “kung flu,” which sparked an explosion of anti-Asian hate. It resurrects the vitriol of nobody-can-out-anti-China-me ads that polluted the Missouri Republican primary campaigns last year.

‘Total substitution of lies for factual truth’

Even the National Park Service was enlisted to root out what the administration considers out of touch with its ideology, surveying visitors if they find any signs or information “un-American” or offensive. Not to be outdone, Rollins established a snitch line for anonymous tips if Chinese buyers are sniffing around the neighborhood looking for a farm.

It’s a scare tactic, like unmarked vans full of masked, armed men marching through public parks, selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise, banning immigrants from several Muslim countries, racially profiling day laborers at Home Depot then shipping them away, threatening news outlets with prosecution if they carry stories that make the administration uncomfortable, and the Republican National Convention crowd cheering a sea of “Mass Deportation Now” placards. It’s dangerously close to the pre-Chinese Exclusion Acts hysteria.

And it depends on obliterating the distinction between fact and truth and deception and untruths, defiling “the cultivation of republican ideals” the Rollins plan purports to protect.

As Hannah Arendt wrote in “On Lying and Politics,” her two important essays on democracy: “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.”

This story was originally published July 19, 2025 at 5:15 AM with the headline "Tone down the fearmongering about China’s supposed threat to Kansas farms | Opinion."