For the past few decades the Communist regime of China has been driving toward world supremacy, both economically and militarily. The regime’s main target has been, and is, the United States of America. China’s plan to grab power has been clever and unprecedented, seeking victory without firing a shot, reducing its targets to mere frogs in a boiling pot.
Pundits and politicians alike, when excusing their strategic dealings with China, are quick to remind their audiences that today’s China is a “centuries-old civilization” rich in tradition and ancient religious discipline. A Confucian civilization that is still upset over wrongdoings during the European colonization period.
Such a view is wrong. The China we are confronted with today is nothing like that pre-19th-century nation. Since the reign of Mao Tse-tung began in 1949, Communist China, much to the dismay, torture, and death of its own citizens, has been governed by tyrannical thugs, thirsty to expand their dictatorial regime and unrelenting in their hatred of Western Civilization and the United States.
Militarily, China has literally surrounded the United States. Once there was a Monroe Doctrine to forbid any foreign power to exert influence in American’s back yard, meaning South, Central, and North America. All nations respected that doctrine as America vigorously imposed it. That is, until China played on the growing weakness of American foreign policy, as when Jimmy Carter gave away the Panama Canal and scuttled all American bases in one of the most the strategic locations of American defense. Since then, China has established relationships and bases in several South and Central American nations.
The Chinese are now building the world’s largest and most powerful navy, aggressively challenging U.S. naval passage in international waters; it now claims the entire South China Sea as an internal Chinese lake; and it is building an aggressive space program that will give it the ability to counter U.S. satellite supremacy, resulting in its ability to spy on every location on Earth and counter U.S. military supremacy.
The difference between the Chinese threat today, and what turned out to be a hollow challenge to the free world by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, is economics. The genius of the Chinese system is that they are using its growing industrial might to create wealth the Soviets could never have dreamed of possessing. China is using its vast wealth (trillions of dollars), compiled from the glut of Chinese goods sold in American stores, to buy its power. It’s buying American debt and wielding heavy influence on the American economy.
Now, however, that Chinese economic power is taking a bizarre and exceptionally dangerous turn right in local American communities. America, it appears, is on the brink of being colonized, because China is fast becoming the largest land owner in America.
This fact is mostly a result of a program through the U.S. Citizen and Immigration Service (USCIS) called Immigrant Investor Regional Centers. The program is known in Washington-speak as EB-5 Centers, so called because they represent a fifth category of employment-based immigration. In reality, it’s a foreign investment program pretending to be a jobs program. To qualify through the plan, applicants must invest $1,000,000 in a U.S. business or at least $500,000 if the business is in an area of high unemployment or rural area. That investment must create or preserve 10 full-time American jobs. In exchange, the immigrant will initially gain legal residency and U.S. Green Cards for their entire family. If the enterprise continues and jobs are created, then the applicant can apply for permanent residence.
According to government reports, since it started in 1990, the EB-5 visa program has brought approximately $6.7 billion to the United States and has created 95,000 jobs. Entrepreneurs across the nation have set up regional centers for foreign investment to market local EB-5 projects to investors. There are now at least 480 EB-5 regional centers located in all 50 states. California alone has 116 of the centers. Many of these projects are focusing on building housing developments. Others are focusing on buying up dairy farms, cattle ranches, meat packing plants, and other sources of American food supplies. Still more are focused on getting a piece of American energy sources. Some of the centers are state-run, others are private investment entities.
Beyond the Green Cards and residency, the immigrants running these projects can also expect government-sponsored benefits such as federal and state grants (taxpayer dollars), tax breaks, or perhaps no sales taxes on supplies and materials they purchase to put the projects in place. Along with federal agencies, the projects work directly with state and county development corporations for more cooperation and help getting through the regulatory mine fields that ordinary American companies must endure.
EB-5 Immigrant Investor Regional Centers are promoted as jobs programs and as a way to help financially strapped communities bring in much-needed money. As a result, the projects are growing across the nation with little concern expressed over the impact and end result of such foreign involvement in American communities. Marriott and Hilton hotel chains have successfully worked EB-5 investment deals to build new hotels. Sony Pictures Entertainment and Warner Brothers have used EB-5 investments to fund film projects. Even the new home of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, Barclay Center, was funded through EB-5 investments.
While the program is open to immigrants from around world, the main interest appears to be from Communist China. According to a report by Michael Snyder (“Chinese Buying Land in US Communities all over America”), in 2012-2013, 6,900 visas were issued to Chinese nationals out of a total of 8,567 EB-5 visas issued. In 2014, the number of applicants is 50 percent higher — again driven by Chinese applicants.
When considering this large influx of Chinese-funded projects, it must be understood that there are no private companies in China that are free to act on their own. China is a Communist regime. Nothing happens there without the express permission and backing of the government. Individuals posing as Chinese corporate leaders are part of that government. They simply wouldn’t have that position if not approved by the government. For the most part they are a front. Forty-three percent of all corporate profits in China are produced by companies that the Chinese government controls outright. And all the rest of their companies are subservient to the power of the government and are very careful not to stray. Individual Chinese citizens are not free to invest as they wish or to leave the country by their own decision. It takes a complicated process through the Chinese bureaucracy for that to happen. And that’s why massive Chinese investments in the EB-5 program are cause for alarm. What are they up to?
In San Francisco, California, China Vanke signed a deal for a $620 million luxury condo project. In Oakland, California, another Chinese company (Zarsion) signed a deal for $1.5 billion for a development deal. In Irvine, California, a housing development will include some of the nation’s largest developers using Chinese money. In New York City, Zhang Xin, CEO of Soho China, joined with Banco Safra Bank of Brazil to buy a piece of the General Motors Building in Midtown. A Chinese developer, Dalian Wanda Group, is planning to build a luxury hotel in Manhattan. In Florida, Chinese investors have put $30 million into the state’s Charter Schools and are intending to invest even more in coming days. Twelve Chinese investors have put $16 million into an aquaculture project on 100 acres in Fellsmere, Florida. In Virginia, the Chinese bought Smithfield Foods and its 460 large farms and facilities in 26 states, employing tens of thousands of Americans. More recent efforts show the Chinese making major investments in the Detroit auto industry. In Thomasville, Alabama, the Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group is negotiating with city officials to build a new plant. The town is ready to give them a 40-acre site that includes a 50,000 square foot building built by the city — with taxpayer money. More such projects are in the works in Idaho, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, and literally every state in the Union.
Meanwhile, Americans were recently shocked to witness a near massacre in the Nevada desert as rancher Cliven Bundy stood his ground against an army of government agents from the Bureau of Land Management. He was accused of letting his cattle graze on public lands, endangering the Desert Tortoise, even though cattle and the Desert Tortoise have coexisted on the range for 100 years. But for this excuse the federal government amassed an army? Not so fast. There is much more to the story. It seems a certain U.S. senator has been involved with EB-5 real estate deals for some time. And that issue has close ties to the Bundy situation.
ENN Energy Group wants to build a $5 billion dollar solar farm in the Dry Lake Solar Energy Zone, on which Bundy’s farm is located. Who are the investors for ENN? The Chinese, using the EB-5 program. Who represents ENN in its negotiations? Rory Reid, Senator Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) son. This little band has already run 52 other ranchers out of the area. Bundy is the last one left. So was the BLM there in force for turtles, or as the private enforcement machine of a corrupt Senator seeking to fill his pockets with cash? Senator Reid is the one who said, “This isn’t over yet.” He’s apparently in a position to know.
However, Reid isn’t the only public figure involved in EB-5 schemes. A little research will also reveal an EB-5 deal by Anthony Rodham, Hillary Clinton’s brother and former son-in-law of Senator Barbra Boxer (D-Calif.). Also in that deal was Terry McAuliffe, former Clinton advisor and now Governor of Virginia. These two gained EB-5 investments for their car company. And then there is Alejandro Mayorkas, who helped push through the deal for McAuliffe and Rodham and is under investigation for it. Mayorkas is now the number-two man at the Department of Homeland Security, aided in getting that position though some questionable maneuvering during his confirmation hearings by none other than Senator Harry Reid.
But perhaps the most aggressive Chinese project is moving forward in Sullivan County, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. This project is called China City. It will eventually cover over 2,000 acres, spread over the towns of Thompson and Mamakating. It will include a Chinese-themed gambling/entertainment complex, hotels, China-related businesses, a high school, a college, and 1,000 residences. According to the plan, every province of China will have an office there and the city will be full of symbols of Chinese culture. When finished it would be a $6 billion project, including a $65 million federal grant of taxpayer money, along with the other incentives such as tax breaks on building supplies and property taxes.
At a recent public meeting, a local citizen asked the China City spokesman if Americans will be allowed to live there. The vague answer was “well, you can visit our amusement park and stay in our hotels.” Is this how Americans are to be treated in their country, in a project paid in part by taxpayer dollars? And exactly what American jobs will be created (as required) in a planned city where no Americans can live? Will the Chinese government send its own workers to do the construction of the city? And what security process will be used to assure such workers are not involved in espionage?
This is a legitimate concern when dealing with the Communist Chinese government. While brilliant in its strategy, it is single-minded in its goal — supremacy. The United States has always stood in its way to achieve that supremacy. But the waning American economy and a U.S. government that no longer sees communism as a threat makes us vulnerable to a power that knows exactly what it seeks.
American communities are so hungry for money that they will ignore almost anything. Red flags should go up when locals are told they can’t live in China City. Why? Is this simply about an investment opportunity, or are China City and other Chinese investments actually to be Chinese colonies? Why will it house offices from every Chinese province? Do we know what those offices are to do? Who will man them? Obviously that is not where the 10 permanent American jobs will come from.
It’s important to note that the Canadian government has decided recently to halt its immigrant investor program due to the large number of Chinese applications that were found to be fraught with fraud and corruption and to be of little economic benefit to the country. Meanwhile, the United States is expanding such programs to make it much easier for foreign investment and ultimately unfettered foreign espionage. We’re creating special foreign trade zones (FTZ) designed to give special U.S. customs treatment to U.S. companies that go along with the EB-5 projects. That means security will be lacking in the interest of “good relations.”
Yet, it was only a decade ago that U.S. intelligence discovered the Chinese had taken control of both ends of the Panama Canal. Using a shell company called Hutchison Whampoa, which was wholly owned by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, it negotiated a 25 to 50 year lease for the Canal ports. As the United States pulled out of our Panamanian bases and headed home, corrupt Panamanian officials were busy selling former U.S. property to the highest bidders and Columbian drug lords, Russian Mafia, and a horde of Chinese “immigrants” filled the void. It was like the bar scene in Star Wars.
Would the Chinese put in missile bases with weapons that could reach the U.S? As Bill Clinton assured us that everything was just fine, the Chinese were busy negotiating with the Cuban communist regime and several other South American countries to create a Chinese presence in the entire region surrounding the Panama Canal. They now considered it their territory for the taking.
Is this now what faces American cities where EB-5 investment programs are being imposed with Chinese Communist money? As a new assault by hordes of Chinese “immigrants” legally invade our nation, filling housing developments and building their own cities, our culture will be affected. Even our system of government could change in areas where Chinese populations begin to grow and perhaps even outnumber Americans. All from an enemy we let through the front door in a government program, based more on greed than American interests.
Like the invasion of the body snatchers, it appears the Chinese, aided by a compliant American government, have a well-devised strategic plan to literally colonize the once great United States of America — without ever firing a shot.
Special thanks to New York Property Rights activist Lynn Teger for her help in researching this article.
Tom DeWeese is one of the nation’s leading advocates of individual liberty, free enterprise, private property rights, personal privacy, back-to-basics education and American sovereignty and independence. Go to americanpolicy.org for more information
