The first instinct you are going to have is actually to be outraged by what you are looking at. Whenever you are looking at this image, especially the bold red bars that is shouting that Chinese actually own a lot of entities and properties in the United States of which the United States has little to nothing in China. Chinese own 247,336 acres of US farmland and the number of Chinese students in America is 261,000 and more.
Why this number might outrage you as a person or trigger you and make it look as if one country gets access to the other country hits the wall but once the emotions are settled down it is time to look into the data if it is true or not. Content like this is meant to trigger us, especially the people that want to make America great again. It is a clear narration of exploitation which people are open to.
Though there is a side of truth in this, the relationship between China and America is asymmetrical. China heavily restricts foreign land ownership and tightly controls foreign influences while the United States is a liberal country and is historically open to everyone which gives it its own name, the land of opportunities. Though this analysis at the top plays two crucial dimensions which is the scale and the context but what it actually means is that Chinese is linked to close to 250,000 acres of land in the United States which is used for agricultural purposes.
That is very huge but when you look at it in the bigger picture that America has 1.2 billion acres of agricultural land and this means that China only has 3-4% of privately held agricultural land. Chinese interest accounts for well under 1% of that foreign owned slice which is around 0.03% of total agricultural land. Then it starts to calm down a little and look at things from another perspective.
Though the graphics may seem so bogus but that is not the case here. This doesn't mean that there is no risk for the American populace, farmland are very sensitive infrastructure and they determine the lot in the country's economic and agricultural landscape. I know he is screaming as if China is buying up American land but that is not true.
Students on the other hand have long been the largest international group in the United States, I mean the Chinese people. While we have very few Chinese in the United States, the gap is purely wide but it is not purely policy. It is just the difference in China's family aggressive pursuit of US degrees.
Why fewer Americans see studying in China as essential to their career and lives? So yes, relationship is the main cause of this, it is not a matter of dominance. This begs the question, should an open society stay open even when its partners are not? When it comes to national security, preventing strategic land grabs, near bases, ports, critical infrastructure or key food supply is something that makes up one of the three issues when it comes to the relationship between China and the United States. Also to be able to reciprocate too.
If America can't buy land or study freely in China, should China entities have broad access in the United States too? Then the third one is the identity. If a country is closing its borders and its system against people of other nations, why can't America also tighten its own borders against people from other nations? Though Donald Trump is actually making efforts to make America great again by making sure a lot of people are shut off so that the American populace can have a lot of opportunities in their hands to take some heaps part, they argue that the real agricultural threat is not Chinese hoeing very minute land, but relentless consolidation of farmland into fewer and fewer hands. So you might be thinking, what should we allow then? There should be a targeted restriction, not a total ban, on buying and use of land for agricultural purposes for outsiders and there should be a lot of transparency, which is very important.
The United States can reciprocate if what it's driving at makes a lot of sense. Though treating students as spies are not actually true, there should be a separation between students and spies because you cannot say someone is coming to study in your country and automatically that makes them a spy. That is not true.