Chinese scare: US blocks controversial Chinese super project to build a mill in North Dakota
A controversial Chinese-owned agricultural project in America's northern plains looks set to be canceled after intervention by the US Air Force, fearing it might harbor espionage agendas.
Brandon Bochenski, mayor of the city of Grand Forks , North Dakota, released a statement to the media on Tuesday saying the large corn mill project proposed by Fufeng USA, a subsidiary of Chinese agribusiness giant Fufeng, “should be stopped".
“The federal government has requested the city's help to halt the project, as geopolitical tensions have risen sharply since the initial announcement of the project,” he added.
The decision comes hours after Senators John Hoeven and Kevin Cramer, both State Republicans, shared a US Air Force letter addressed to Cramer, saying the "proposed project poses a significant threat to national security." , with both short- and long-term risks of significant impacts on our operations in the area.” Fufeng USA declined to comment on the development.
The initial approval of the project by the city council early last year sparked public concern and outrage due to the ties to China – Fufeng is based in Shandong province – and the proximity of the land at Grand Forks Air Force Base, home to United States intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance units.
This case shows how the attitude of the USA, both at the federal and local level, is profoundly changing towards Chinese investments in its territory, even when these seem, apparently, harmless, like a simple corn mill.
Huawei Technologies, one of China's largest telecommunications equipment makers, and TikTok, the short-video app owned by China's top-rated unicorn ByteDance, have recently faced growing hurdles to their presence in the United States.
The block on the project came despite the fact that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which monitors foreign investment, had not blocked it due to lack of jurisdiction. However, the Air Force did not stop in front of this problem and directly wrote committing itself against the project in question. Then, in a joint press release Tuesday, Senators Hoeven and Cramer called on Grand Forks city officials to "stop" the Fufeng project and "work together to find a US company to develop the agricultural project."
Fufeng's project involved the purchase of 150 hectares of land and an initial investment of 700 million dollars. A boon for a small local community, with the creation of hundreds of jobs and millions of dollars in taxes paid to the local government, but the suspicion towards Chinese investors and their possible ulterior motives was too great. Now we need to see if there is a US investor willing to do the same thing…
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The article Chinese fear: US blocks controversial Chinese super project to build a mill in North Dakota comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/paura-cinese-gli-usa-bloccano-controverso-super-progetto-cinese-per-costruire-un-mulino-nel-nord-dakota/ on Wed, 01 Feb 2023 09:00:54 +0000.