• An activist judge at a Federal Appeals Court — previously at the ACLU and before that, SPLC — halted a Florida law banning citizens of China, Iran, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria, and companies associated with those countries, from buying agricultural land in Florida, as well as any property within a 10-mile radius of a military base or any other “critical infrastructure” on the grounds that the law is racist.

• The Chinese plaintiffs who sued were represented by at least one lawyer who has previously served as legal counsel for numerous Chinese state-owned enterprises controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

• Chinese citizens aren't even really banned from buying land: Those with non-tourist visas can buy a residential property so long as it’s five miles away from a military base and smaller than two acres.

• Why should Americans be forced to compete with the entire population of planet Earth for real estate in our own country? And what business do foreigners who don’t even live in the U.S. have in owning land?

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Last month, SB264, a Florida law barring non-resident Chinese nationals from buying property in the state was denounced by its critics as racist against Asians and halted by a Federal Appeals Court in Georgia. The court argued the bill violated the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment, citing “anti-Chinese” statements by Florida politicians as evidence of the state’s supposed discriminatory intent. The anti-China rhetoric in question? A statement by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ press office celebrating his signing of SB264 that explained the bill was enacted to “counteract the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party in the state of Florida” and a tweet by DeSantis accusing the Justice Department of “siding with Communist China against Florida’s law prohibiting CCP-tied entities from buying land in Florida.”

The conflation of anti-CCP rhetoric with anti-Asian racism is par for the course. For the past several years, NGOs, the mainstream press, and some politicians have made great efforts to portray all but the most tempered and qualified suspicions of China as anti-Asian racism. Don’t Let the Chinese Spy Balloon Become the New ‘Kung Flu’,” wrote former Federal Prosecutor Shan Wu in the Daily Beast last year, arguing that the recent downing of the Chinese surveillance balloon “ignores the danger posed to Asian Americans by an excessive emphasis on China as an economic and military ‘adversary.’” (Quotation marks around adversary his). A 2022 document produced by the prominent NGO Stop AAPI Hate claimed that politicians who criticized China, either by describing the country as an “economic threat,” naming it as the source of COVID-19, or by accusing its ruling Communist Party of espionage, were inflaming anti-Asian scapegoating and hate crimes.

Similarly, the reaction to SB264 has been hysterical. Foreign Policy compared it to the Chinese Exclusion Act, a 19th-century law that banned Chinese people from immigrating to the United States. Vox simply called it “racist” and said it made it harder for Asian Americans to buy homes. But what does SB264 actually say? Why was it passed? Who opposes it, on what legal grounds, and why?

Passed last year, SB264 places property ownership restrictions on companies and people associated with a series of countries. It bans citizens of Iran, Russia, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria — and companies associated with those countries — from buying agricultural land in Florida, as well as any property within a 10-mile radius of a military base or any other “critical infrastructure.” The restrictions on China are more stringent. Chinese companies and people “domiciled in China” — i.e., Chinese citizens or citizens of other countries who live in China — who are not US citizens or permanent residents are barred from buying property of any kind in the state. However, there is an exception. Individuals from any of the specified countries — including China — can purchase a single residential property in the state, so long as they have a non-tourist visa in the US (such as a temporary work or student visa), the property is fewer than two acres, and it’s located more than five miles away from a military base. (Those who already own property are allowed to keep it, but must register their holdings with the Florida state government.)

Basically, any Chinese national with a legal right to study or work in Florida, even temporarily, can buy a house here so long as it isn’t large enough to convert into a compound and isn’t a hop-skip-and-jump away from a military base. It’s hardly the “narrow exception” described by Judge Nancy Abudu in her ruling against the bill.

It's not as if the provisions in this bill came out of nowhere. A year earlier, in 2022, a Chinese company purchased hundreds of acres of farmland in Grand Forks, North Dakota to build a “corn milling plant,” just a few miles away from an Air Force base. The proposed plant's proximity to the Grand Forks Air Force base raised eyebrows in Washington, but it also highlighted China’s increasingly large agricultural holdings in the U.S., including nearly 400,000 acres of U.S. farmland and major food companies like Smithfield. That’s right. In case you missed it, since 2013 the country’s largest pork producer has been owned by WH Group, a Chinese conglomerate. We’ve allowed a company that exists at the mercy of the CCP to obtain near-monopolistic control over one of our country's most common proteins, and thus put ourselves in a ridiculous situation whereby China could, at any point, stop Americans from bringing home the bacon. China also has a history of stealing agricultural trade secrets from American companies. For example, in 2022, a scientist employed by American agricultural giant Monsanto pleaded guilty to stealing software created by the company on behalf of the Chinese government.

In the court case against Florida, the Chinese plaintiffs (four Chinese citizens plus one “Chinese-speaking” LLC) argued they were neither members of the Chinese government nor the CCP, and, because of this, the state of Florida had wrongly discriminated against them based on their national origin. To quote the ACLU: “Governor DeSantis and the statute itself have relied on pernicious stereotypes to wrongly conflate people merely domiciled in China with their government — treating Chinese people as inherently suspicious and mere instruments of the CCP.”

Of course, membership in the party is difficult to verify, even for State Department employees issuing visas in Beijing. The state of Florida has no special insight into CCP membership, and, even if it did, it would hardly matter. The Chinese government has a long-documented strategy of recruiting intelligence assets in the U.S. who previously had no direct connection to the party. It’s reasonable to suspect that Chinese nationals without American citizenship or permanent residency are particularly susceptible to this type of recruitment, as their presence in the U.S. is temporary at best. It wouldn’t be unreasonable for such people to suspect that refusing to cooperate with their government could have repercussions for their lives back in China. This is a country with a social credit system, after all, and it's no secret that anyone who wants to succeed in business, academia, or anything else had better make nice with the party.

Whether an individual Chinese citizen is ideologically committed to communism, or particularly loyal to the CCP is beside the point. It’s not that Chinese nationals are “inherently suspicious,” it's that they are inherently vulnerable to life-threatening coercion from home, and recruitment as intelligence assets. Loyalty to the CCP is not a matter of personal political opinion for Chinese citizens, it is the basis for virtually all social and economic life in their home country. Completely ignoring the totalitarian relationship between the Chinese government and its citizenry simply because acknowledging it can be construed as a “pernicious stereotype” is itself pernicious. It forces the government to live in a sort of fantasy land where I — a natural-born American citizen with no connection to China — am no more or less likely a Chinese spy than a mysteriously wealthy Chinese national on a tourist visa who wants to put in an over-market cash bid on a condo that just so happens to be down the street from a military base.

It’s worth noting that the Chinese plaintiffs were represented by at least one lawyer, Keliang (Clay) Zhu, who has previously served as legal counsel for numerous Chinese state-owned enterprises directly controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. His firm, Dehing Law Offices, is an international law firm headquartered in Beijing. It's unclear why the plaintiffs are being represented by the Silicon Valley subsidiary of an international Chinese law firm that focuses mostly on corporate law during a constitutional law case in Florida, particularly when they already have the assistance of the ACLU, a white shoe law firm in DC called Quinn Emmanuel Urquhart and Sullivan, LLP, as well as the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. Personally, if I was trying to make the case that I had no connection to the Chinese government, I wouldn’t have hired their lawyers.

Moving on.

The legal argument against SB264 revolves around the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, and the ability of states to restrict land ownership to non-citizens. Florida argued that SB 264 does not violate the equal protection clause — as alleged by the Chinese plaintiffs — because it regulates by domicile and immigration status rather than by race or national origin (the restrictions do not apply to people of ethnic Chinese heritage, regardless of their national origin, so long as they are either American citizens or permanent residents). Florida asserts that its ability to restrict land ownership to people “domiciled in China” (as well as people domiciled in Russia, Syria, etc.) derives from the 1923 court case Terrance v. Thompson, which upheld a Washington state law preventing certain foreigners from owning, using, or leasing land. The Chinese plaintiffs claim that SB264 discriminates against Chinese people based on their national origin, because “people domiciled in China” is a proxy for Chinese people. They also claim the bill has an illegal “disparate impact” barred by the Fair Housing Act based on national origin and race (for all Asians, somehow, apparently). As for Terrence v. Thompson, the plaintiffs argue that the Supreme Court case was “discredited” — even though it has never been officially overturned — because it is an old case that’s been superseded by newer cases that more strictly scrutinize state laws “discriminating based on alienage.” They also argue that, even if the Terrence standard was applied, SB 264 would not hold up because Terrence says the restrictions cannot be “arbitrary” or “unreasonable.”

The court bought the “Terrence is discredited” line. In the court’s ruling, Judge Nancy Abudu acknowledged that Terrence had never been overturned by the Supreme Court, but claimed that more recent court rulings had “degraded it.” Moreover, she claimed — again, citing anti-CCP statements by DeSantis, which she described as “anti-Chinese” — that the bill intended to establish a “blanket ban” prohibiting Chinese non-citizens from owning land in Florida. (A rather small blanket, considering permanent residents are unaffected by the ban and Chinese citizens with non-tourist visas can buy a residential property so long as it’s five miles away from a military base, and smaller than two acres.)

Abudu’s ruling shouldn’t have been surprising to anyone familiar with her record, which is very short on the bench — she just began serving on the Eleventh Circuit in September 2023, her first job as a judge — but very long in the world of legal activism. In 2005, she began working at the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project in Georgia, and in 2013 became legal Director of the ACLU of Florida — which represented the Chinese plaintiffs in this case, by the way. After she left the ACLU in 2019 she became Deputy Legal Director for the Southern Poverty Law Center — last seen screeching about how Elon has given a platform to the far-right or whatever. Her left-wing pedigree caused her confirmation to be held up for nearly a year, as she faced opposition from Republicans in the Senate and even Democratic moderate Joe Manchin, who voted against her nomination, with a spokesperson saying in a statement “With Americans’ faith in our courts at historic lows, now is not the time to confirm partisan advocates to lifetime appointments — especially to our circuit courts.”

The 11th Circuit Court ruling was technically a narrow one — an injunction for two of the plaintiffs allowing them to proceed with existing real-estate contracts — but one based on the belief of the court that the plaintiffs will be successful in challenging the law at another 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Miami on April 15. The final outcome is still uncertain, and difficult to predict. After all, the case ended up in an appeals court because the Chinese plaintiffs appealed after a Trump-appointed judge ruled against them last August. Perhaps more than anything, the fate of the law — at least in the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals — rests on which three judges are randomly assigned to the panel, something we won’t know until early April.

Frankly, I don’t see any reason why Americans should be forced to compete with the entire population of planet Earth for real estate in our own country, and I fail to understand what business foreigners who don’t even live in the U.S. have in owning our most finite resource — land. It's particularly ironic that non-resident Chinese nationals would accuse Florida of being racist given their own country's laws on foreign ownership of property, which are far more stringent than Florida’s. Foreigners who want to “own” property in China — which is to say, lease it, since all land belongs to the government — are restricted to one residential property (sound familiar?) and can only “buy” it if they have legally lived in China for a minimum of 12 months. Also, you aren’t allowed to rent the property out. This is far more restrictive than SB264.

Although the potential for Chinese espionage and recruitment of spies among Chinese nationals living temporarily in the U.S. is a serious concern, it is obvious that for many wealthy Chinese this is business. They don’t even want to live here, which is why they don’t have green cards. They want to get their money out of Beijing — where their government can take it at any time — and buy a condo in Miami just like the Slavs, Arabs, South Americans, and all manner of other wealthy foreigners from politically unstable countries. If you care to imagine South Florida, imagine a nice house with the lights off. I live here, I know the game, and if the price of combatting Chinese espionage means a businessman from Fujian can’t buy a second house in South Beach, well, boo-hoo.

Speaking of foreigners from unsavory countries, it is rather odd that our relationship with China has become a racialized issue whereas it hasn’t with Russia, even when people were imagining everyone with a Slavic last name was part of a vast Russian conspiracy theory to commandeer the presidency, or boycotting Russian restaurants, because of the war in Ukraine. Suspicion and hatred of Russians have become oddly acceptable among a certain type of MSNBC liberal. I don’t see any of them jumping to accuse Florida — which also placed ownership restrictions on Russians — of Russophobia. This is even though Russia — although certainly not a liberal democracy — is nowhere near the totalitarian state that China is. People in Russia do not need Putin’s party’s permission to open a cafe or buy a house. Russia does not have a social credit score system; it does not monitor the daily movements of every individual citizen using a dystopian system of spyware and facial recognition technology. The Russians have maybe half the control over their citizenry that the Chinese do. Yet still, no amount of unsubtle suspicion is deemed problematic. The only explanation for this is that Chinese people are considered “people of color” — therefore members of a permanent victim class — while Russians are considered a particularly evil subset of white people.

In either case, we should not bury our heads in the sand to avoid spurious accusations of “xenophobia.” It's not unreasonable to suspect that foreigners, from whatever land, would be more loyal to their own country than one in which they have no permanent residency, to say nothing of citizenship. I would certainly hope that’s true of Americans — although some of them in the legal profession seem dead set on turning citizenship into a pointless designation too taboo and racist to even bother bringing up.

But citizenship still does matter, in my head, if not in the courts. So as an American, I say if the bourgeois elements of our country's international competitors want to buy property here and we must let them — for the sake of the realtor's lobby or anti-racism or whatever else — the least they can do is launder their money a safe distance from our military bases. It's not too much to ask.

– River Page