Chinese Spy Balloon ‘Compromises’ American Safety, Underscores Need to Ban Farmland Sales to China

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Alex Wagner Tonight,” Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) stated that the Chinese spy balloon “compromises” American safety and “only adds fuel to” the urgent need to ban China from buying farmland because allowing China to buy farmland gives China a lane “to replace us in the world as a military and economic leader” and endangers our food supply and national security.

Tester said, “This is a very bad situation, quite frankly. China has been trying to replace us as the world’s economic leader and military leader for some time now, and they’ve…done some very provocative things around Taiwan and in the Indo-Pacific. They do things on the Internet all the time that are not helpful. And so, we need to get to the bottom of all this. We need to get — find out why decisions were made that were made. And I’m not saying they were wrong decisions, but we need to find out why the decisions that the military made were made the way they were. A lot of that information can’t be given outside, some of it can be and we’ll get as much of it as we can out to the public. But, in the end, we need to find out what has happened, why it happened, and make sure this never happens again. We need to absolutely make sure this country is safe. And this surveillance balloon, I think, at least from my perspective, compromises that somewhat.”

He added, “I think it only makes common sense that if we’ve got folks who are enemies of ours, and as I said, China wants to replace us in the world as a military and economic leader, that we ought not be providing them avenues to do that. Sen. Rounds (R-SD) and myself have a bill that we’re pushing through that, hopefully, we will get to the president’s desk very, very soon that prevents folks like China from buying farmland. There are plenty of folks that are farming the ground right now that believe this has already happened. And if it has, that’s yet another problem, because any time you have a foreign adversary that’s buying farmland, that not only compromises our food supply, it compromises our national security. And we are going to be pushing hard in a bipartisan way to get that bill across the finish line. And I think this surveillance balloon only adds fuel to that urgency.”