State lawmakers across the US have introduced at least 240 anti-China proposals this year, aiming to ensure public funds do not buy Chinese technology or even T-shirts, coffee mugs and key chains for tourists. They are also targeting sister-city relationships between US and Chinese communities.
After years celebrating trade ties with China, states do not want police to buy Chinese drones, government agencies to use Chinese apps, software or parts, or public pension systems to invest in Chinese companies.
A new Kansas law covers artificial intelligence and medical equipment, while in Arkansas, the targets include sister-city ties and state and local contracts for promotional items. Tennessee prohibits health insurance coverage for organ transplants performed in China or with organs from China.
Photo: AP
“Either the United States or China is going to lead the world in the next few decades,” Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said after pushing a wide-ranging “Communist China Defense” package into law. “For me, I want it to be the US.”
The push started well before US President Donald Trump imposed 145 percent tariffs on China, but his posture is encouraging state officials, particularly fellow Republicans.
Anti-China proposals have been introduced this year in at least 41 states, but mostly in Republican-controlled legislatures, an Associated Press analysis using the bill-tracking software Plural showed.
Trump’s rhetoric encouraged the push since his first term, said Kyle Jaros, an associate professor of global affairs at the University of Notre Dame who writes about China’s relationships with US states.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic soured American attitudes.
“The first Trump administration had a very different message than the preceding [Barack] Obama administration about state and local engagement with China,” Jaros said. “It tended to not see the value.”
Playing a “patriotism card” against China resonates with US voters, said David Adkins, a former Kansas legislator who is CEO of the nonpartisan Council on State Governments.
“Politicians of both parties, at all levels of government, pay no price for vilifying China,” Adkins said in an e-mail.
John David Minnich, a modern China academic and assistant professor at the London School of Economics, attributed states’ measures largely to “targeted, strategic lobbying,” not popular pressure.
Critics see China as more anti-US and authoritarian under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), and US officials say China has a booming hacking-for-hire ecosystem to collect overseas intelligence.
Some state officials also began seeing China as a concrete threat when a Chinese balloon flew over the US in 2023, said Sara Newland, an associate professor of government at Smith College who conducts research with Jaros.
“There is this idea that a Chinese investment is actually going to result in the Chinese government spying on individual people or threatening food security in a particular area,” she said.
Kansas House of Representatives Majority Leader Chris Croft, a retired US Army colonel, said that countering China is a “joint effort” for states and the US government.
He championed a law greatly limiting property ownership within 160km of a military installation in Kansas by firms and people tied to foreign adversaries — China, but also Cuba, Iran and North Korea.
“All of us have a part to play,” he said.
Further limiting foreign property ownership remains popular, with at least 46 proposals in 24 states, but critics liken imposing restrictions to selling snow shovels to Miami residents.
Together, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean and Cuban interests owned less than 1 percent of the nation’s 514 million hectares of agricultural land at the end of 2023, a US Department of Agriculture report showed.
Chinese interests’ share was about 112,100 hectares, or two-hundredths of 1 percent.
Minnich said that if Trump’s tariffs get China to reset relations with the US, that would undercut what states have done, but if Trump seeks “sustained decoupling,” state measures would likely have minimal effects on China in the short term, compared with Trump’s policies.
Yet states do not seem likely to stop.
Joras said states have valid concerns about potential Chinese cyberattacks and whether critical infrastructure relies too heavily on Chinese equipment.
“The vast majority of China’s threats to the US are in cyberspace,” he said. “Some of those defenses are still not solid.”
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