China’s Geographical (Trade) Expansionism.

ASSOCIATED Press: “Courts: Florida ban on property purchases by citizens of China and some other countries is challenged." Long before Sinophobia engulfed 21st century or the internet universe, we Filipinos were already thrust on a Chinese world of land acquisitions. One day, they moved in the `hood with a hardware shop and convenience store, next they owned the entire block. These days, they lord over giant malls, the size of a small town, all over the archipelago, and more. But that is the Chinese way, always been. 

        China's expansionism isn't military. But sheer economics. 

        In all, Chinese companies have gained control of 6.48 million hectares of land devoted to agriculture, forestry and mining around the world from 2011 to 2020, mostly in Asia and Africa. That figure dwarfs the combined hectares controlled by the British, Americans, and Japanese. 

       Fact is, China has been buying lands since the 1970s at the early stages of Deng Xiaoping's "open door" policy. The combined area of land purchased or leased by Chinese companies over the past decade is equal to the total land area of Sri Lanka or Lithuania and much larger than acquisitions by their counterparts in the U.S. and other major countries, according to Land Matrix, a European land monitoring organization. 

       For example, Chinese companies are heavily involved in banana cultivation in Myanmar. Banana exports from Myanmar soared 250 times from $1.5 million in 2013 to $370 million in 2020. In the southern Vietnamese province of Binh Phuoc, China's New Hope Liuhe, a leading Chinese livestock company, bought a 75-hectare plot of land developed in 2019. Amid soaring timber prices, a Chinese company, Wan Peng, has been shipping large quantities of timber from Congo to China. Chinese companies are also buying mines. China Minmetals invested $280 million in Tanzania in 2019, and China Non-Ferrous Metal Mining poured $730 million into a mining operation in Guinea in 2020.

       The Chinese land acquisitions within the soy sector in Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia are also widespread. China bought as much as 71 percent of Argentina's soybean production in 2013, and. 4.95 percent of Brazil's the following year. ⛰🏝🇨🇳

MEANWHILE, true. China owns 380,000 acres of land in the U.S. Should that worry Americans? Not really. Chinese-owned lands in the U.S. are far less than what Canada, Netherlands, Italy, the U.K. and Germany, in that order, each own. China is #18 on the list of foreign investors in the United States, believe it or not. 

      But China’s rise — coupled with its geopolitical heft and its strategic goals that are sometimes at odds with Washington’s — has raised questions over who owns this land and how much control the Chinese government has over the ownership. Or is paranoia borned out of historical Sinophobia? Or anti-Chinese sentiment is a fear or dislike of China, Chinese people or Chinese culture. ⛰🏝🇨🇳