The White House on Monday gave a Chinese-linked company and its partners 120 days to sell property they had bought near a U.S. Air Force base in Wyoming that is home to part of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, citing fears of spying.
The move comes as the United States has become increasingly concerned about the national security risks posed by Chinese-led purchases of American property near sensitive military sites.
MineOne Partners Limited, which is owned by Chinese nationals, partnered with other companies to buy real estate for cryptocurrency mining in June 2022, the White House said.
The property is located within 1 mile (1.6 kilometers) of Wyoming-based Francis E. Warren Air Force Base, which is home to part of the U.S. arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles.
“The proximity of the foreign-owned Real Estate to a strategic missile base and key element of America’s nuclear triad, and the presence of specialized and foreign-sourced equipment potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities, presents a national security risk to the United States,” the White House said in a statement.
Reuters reported in 2022 that the Biden administration was investigating Chinese telecoms equipment maker Huawei over concerns that U.S. cell towers fitted with its gear could capture sensitive information from military bases and missile silos that the company could then transmit to China.
The MineOne Partners deal was reviewed by CFIUS, a powerful panel led by the Treasury Department that scrutinizes foreign investment in the United States for national security risks.
A 2018 law expanded CFIUS’s authority to review foreign acquisitions of some non-controlling investments in U.S. real estate transactions that pose national security concerns.
The move on Monday “highlights the critical gatekeeper role that CFIUS serves to ensure that foreign investment does not undermine our national security, particularly as it relates to transactions that present risk to sensitive U.S. military installations as well as those involving specialized equipment and technologies,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement.
The White House on Monday (US time) issued an order prohibiting the purchase and requiring the divestment of real estate operated as a cryptocurrency mining facility in close proximity to a US Air Force base in Wyoming, which is a strategic missile base that’s home to the US Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles.
The owner of the facility, MineOne Partners, has been reported to be majority-owned by entities in China.
The order by US President Joe Biden was reviewed by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), a panel led by the Treasury Department.
The CFIUS cited the presence of specialized and foreign-sourced equipment potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities as a reason for its decision, without providing further evidence.
The move came amid increasingly intense anti-China sentiment in the US and the spinning of a “land grabbing” narrative, and Chinese analysts noted that the event may be nothing more than a new episode of the “China threat” during a US election year.
Zhou Mi, a senior research fellow at the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation, told the Global Times on Tuesday that the event may prove the US government is overly concerned with the issue of national security.
“Military bases all had security precautions in place and the sudden revoking of the property deal may prove unnecessary,” Zhou said, noting that limiting the prohibition to specific groups is a politicized operation and blatant discrimination and serves only to dent the confidence of global investors in the US.
Investors would prefer transparency and predictability, instead of being told that they have to divest their investment in a retroactive fashion, Zhou said.
The incident came amid media hype in the US over the “China threat.”
US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo last week warned that the US may take “extreme action” and seek to ban Chinese connected vehicles on national security grounds.
The US has also launched a probe into the Chinese maritime, logistics and shipbuilding industries.
Some Chinese economists and international relations experts said that although it is unsurprising to see some US politicians play the anti-China card as much as they can in an election year, the claim that China is grabbing US land is fairly absurd, as China legally holds less than 1 percent of all the foreign-owned land in the US.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry last week urged the US not to overstretch the concept of national security, or weaken or sever one’s economic ties with other countries, which will lead nowhere.
It will only destabilize global industrial and supply chains, disrupt the international trade order and end up harming one’s own interests, the Ministry said.
