TOPEKA: State lawmakers across the US have introduced at least 240 anti-China proposals this year, aiming to ensure public funds don’t buy Chinese technology or even T-shirts, coffee mugs and key chains for tourists. They’re also targeting sister-city relationships between American and Chinese communities.
After years celebrating trade ties with China, states don’t 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 now prohibits health insurance coverage for organ transplants performed in China or with organs from China.
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“Either the United States or China is going to lead the world in the next few decades,” Arkansas Gov Sarah Huckabee Sanders said after successfully pushing a wide-ranging “Communist China Defence” package into law. “For me, I want it to be the US.”
The push started well before President Donald Trump imposed 145 per cent tariffs on China, but his posture is encouraging state officials, particularly fellow Republicans. Sanders said her efforts compliment Trump’s trade policies.
Anti-China proposals have been introduced this year in at least 41 states, but mostly in GOP-controlled legislatures, according to an Associated Press analysis using the bill-tracking software Plural.
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 Obama administration about state and local engagement with China,” Jaros said. “It tended to not see the value.”
An effort with little political risk
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 email.
John David Minnich, a scholar of modern China and assistant professor at the London School of Economics, attributed states’ measures largely to “targeted, strategic lobbying,” not a popular pressure.
A Chinese balloon alarms state officials
Critics see China as more anti-American and authoritarian under President Xi Jinping, 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 Majority Leader Chris Croft, a retired Army colonel, said countering China is a “joint effort” for states and the US government. He championed a new law greatly limiting property ownership within 160 kilometres 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,” Croft 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 per cent of the nation’s 1.27 billion acres of agricultural land at the end of 2023, according to a US Department of Agriculture report. Chinese interests’ share was about 2,77,000 acres, or two-hundredths of 1 per cent.
And in Arkansas, only the state capital of Little Rock is affected by the ban on sister-city relationships.
Even conservatives have questions
Misgivings about anti-China measures extend even to conservative North Dakota, where a Chinese company’s plan to develop farmland near an Air Force base inspired anti-China efforts that spread elsewhere.
Some North Dakota lawmakers wanted to divest a state fund holding billions of dollars in oil tax revenues from Chinese companies. But the Senate killed a weaker version of the measure last week.
Republican Sen Dale Patten suggested during the debate that lawmakers backing the bill were being inconsistent.
“I would guess that this body right now is already heavily invested in neckties that have been manufactured in China, if we want to flip our ties over and take a look at it,” Patten said. “That’s how difficult it is when we talk about doing something like this.”
States aren’t likely done with China
Minnich said if Trump’s tariffs get China to reset relations with the US, that would undercut what states have done. If Trump seeks “sustained decoupling,” state measures likely will have minimal effect on China in the short-term, compared to Trump’s policies, he said.
Yet states don’t seem likely to stop.
Joras said they do 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 defences are still not solid.”
