America’s Anti-China Restrictions Are Going Local

Anti-China Restrictions :-While commerce between the US and China is still strong, political forces in America are trying to stifle it through a wave of local initiatives from Texas to Virginia.

It’s not the first time local American officials have shown anti-China views. California had already adopted its own Chinese Exclusion Act decades before the federal government passed the 1882 legislation limiting immigration from China.

Chinese corporations and people will be prevented from investing abroad due to restrictions on investment that a few US states are supporting. Moreover, they will make it more difficult for federal lawmakers to take any stance other than one of outright anti-China during legislative elections.

According to Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, “we’re witnessing a significant shift in the US,” he said in talks last month at Harvard University. Now, “infecting municipal and state administrations” is the worry that China “is trying to supplant the US.”

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  Chinese investors may now have further reasons to be concerned aside from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the US, a body governed by the Treasury Department and able to block transactions perceived to pose a danger to national security.

Texas lawmakers enacted a legislation prohibiting foreign companies from owning public infrastructure. Concerns from Texas ranchers over a former People’s Liberation Army captain whose company acquired 140,000 acres (56,656 hectares) of property near the Mexico border led them to contemplate a proposal to outright ban Chinese from owning rural land.

Despite some opposition, Republican Governor Greg Abbott has already expressed support for the initiative. According to the National Agricultural Law Center, at least 18 states have considered limiting the ownership of farmland by organizations connected to China and other foreign countries.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis

Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida and probable GOP candidate for president in 2024, included references to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in his state of the state speech this week. “Now that we see the CCP attempting to acquire significant tracts of property around the US, our message in Florida is extremely straightforward. We won’t permit CCP-supported companies to seize territory in our state, he declared.

Republicans aren’t the only ones who are criticizing China. A restriction on “foreign foes” owning land was just enacted by Virginia’s state senate, which is run by Democrats.

Glenn Youngkin, the Republican governor of that state, is worried about more than simply property. Early this year, he eliminated Virginia from consideration for an electric-battery factory that Ford Motor Co. and a sizable Chinese supplier—Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., or CATL—had proposed as a joint venture.

The acquisition was seen as a Trojan horse that would undercut attempts to improve the American car sector by Youngkin, who has also been suggested as a prospective GOP candidature. Oddly, Xi Jinping, the president of China, was also concerned about CATL. According to Bloomberg, Chinese officials declared last month that they will carefully examine their agreement with Ford because to fears that the American manufacturer may get access to competitive CATL technology.

All of these trends support Louis-Vincent Gave’s assessment that “de-globalization has so far been less about commerce and more to do with financial flows,” who is also the co-founder of Gavekal Research.

In other words, it is simpler to prohibit large projects or home purchases than it is to alter the behavior of millions of customers. At the very least, though, the political chest-thumping of American legislators with an eye on the White House serves as a demonstration of the growing hostility between the two economic titans.