Chinese billionaire Chen Tianqiao has become the second-largest foreign owner of land in the United States.
According to the magazine The Land Report, Chen owns 198,000 acres of timberland in Oregon, making him the country's overall 82nd-largest property owner. In terms of being not a U.S. citizen, only the Irving family of Canada owns more land, with over 1.2 million acres of timberland in Maine. The Irving family is also the sixth largest overall property owner in the country. (Related: Amazon, Bill Gates, China buying up land all over the U.S. in run up to Great Reset agenda.)
Chen, 50, first started acquiring huge tracts of timberland in Oregon from title insurance-focused investment firm Fidelity National Financial Ventures back in 2015, when he acquired nearly 200,000 acres or about 300 square miles of timberland from the now-defunct Crown Pacific Partners. This initial purchase cost him $85 million, amounting to around $430 per acre.
Oregon tax records accessed by The Land Report in December 2023 found that the name of the subsidiary that holds onto the land for Chen is Shanda Asset Management, a company named after Chen's Singapore-based holding group.
Chen began his prolific business career in 1999 when he started an online gaming company, Shanda Interactive. Within five years, it had become one of the communist nation's largest internet companies and was even publicly listed on the Nasdaq for a few years before he took it private and moved his holding group's headquarters to Singapore.
Since 2014, Chen has been growing the Shanda Group's investment portfolio to include public and private equities, venture capital firms and, most importantly to U.S. national security, real estate. He even owns approximately half a million acres of timberland in Ontario, Canada.
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Chen and his wife Chrissy have also spent the past few years acquiring landmark properties in the United States. In 2018, they bought the Vanderbilt Mansion on East 69th Street in Manhattan for $39 million. In 2021, they purchased the Seeley Mudd Estate in the eastern Los Angeles suburb of San Marino for $25 million.
As of 2024, Chen's net worth is currently pegged at about $1 billion, down from its peak of $1.5 billion a decade ago. He and his wife currently live in San Francisco's South Bay region.
Foreigners are snatching up tens of millions of acres of American land
The prospect of foreign ownership of American land – particularly, valuable land such as land used for farming – has become a sensitive political issue in recent years as international corporations and wealthy foreign individuals continue to buy up American land.
According to the most recent data on foreign land ownership from the Department of Agriculture, non-American interests own about 40 million acres of agricultural land in the U.S. as of 2021. Entities from communist China make up the bulk of foreign agricultural landowners, and they currently own the equivalent of 0.03 percent of all farmland in the United States.
Rural properties, including agricultural land, have become very popular assets for ultrawealthy investors in recent years. In 2023 alone, the average value of American cropland jumped by 8.1 percent. Since 2020, American farmland values have risen by more than a third, with the growth primarily driven by food demand, high inflation and skyrocketing interest in rarefied properties such as agricultural land sitting on top of classic western ranches that also offer recreational value and thus higher potential returns on investments.
This is well above the growth in U.S. home prices, which rose by 5.2 percent year-over-year in November, the strongest annual growth rate recorded since January 2023.
Because of the dangers posed by foreign land ownership, many lawmakers have pushed for national rules to restrict foreign investments that entail the transferring of land ownership to foreign entities, especially when it involves agricultural properties.
In July 2023, the Senate voted to ban the sale of farmland beyond a certain acreage or value to people or businesses from China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. As of press time, this measure has still not been signed into law, leaving individual states to handle the matter on their own.
Almost half of all states already have some sort of restrictions on foreign ownership on the books. In 2023, 36 states proposed additional legislation on the issue, ranging from caps to bans that target certain countries. About a dozen states passed some of these additional measures, and more bills are expected in this year's upcoming sessions.
Learn the latest news regarding China and its antagonism toward the United States at CommunistChina.news.
Watch this clip from InfoWars featuring former Iowa Rep. Steve King warning about the United Nations' ongoing land grab in the American Heartland.
This video is from the InfoWars channel on Brighteon.com.
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China continues to snatch up U.S. farmland, American companies at alarming rates.
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