Topekaha, Kan. – State legislators throughout the United States have introduced at least 240 anti-china proposals this year, with the aim of ensuring that public funds do not buy Chinese technology or even t-shirts, coffee and tourist key. They are also pointing to sister-citizen relations between US and Chinese communities.
After years of celebrating commercial ties with China, states do not want the police to buy Chinese drones, government agencies to use Chinese applications, software or pieces or public pension systems to invest in Chinese companies. A new Kansas law covers artificial intelligence and medical teams, while in Arkansas, the objectives include ties of sister cities and state and local contracts for promotional items. Tennessee now prohibits health insurance coverage for organ transplants carried out in China or with China organs.
“The United States or China will direct the world in the coming decades,” said Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, after successfully promoting a broad package of “communist defense in China.” “For me, I want it to be the United States”
The impulse began long before President Donald Trump imposed 145% tariffs on China, but his position is to encourage state officials, particularly other Republicans. Sanders said his efforts congratulate Trump’s commercial policies.
Anti-China proposals have been introduced this year in at least 41 states, but mainly in legislatures controlled by the Republican Party, according to an analysis of the associated press using the Plural ticket monitoring software.
Trump’s rhetoric encouraged the impulse since his first mandate, said Kyle Jaros, associate professor of World Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, who writes about China’s relations with the states of the United States. Then, Covid-19 pandemic grouped US attitudes.
“Trump’s first administration had a very different message from the previous Obama administration about the state and local commitment to China,” said Jaros. “He tended not to see the value.”
Playing a “patriotism card” against China resonates with US voters, said David Adkins, a former Kansas legislator who is CEO of the non -partisan council of state governments.
“The politicians of both parties, at all levels of the government, do not pay price for vilifying China,” Adkins said in an email.
John David Minnich, scholar of modern China and assistant professor at the London School of Economics, attributed the measures of the states to a large extent to “strategic and directed lobbying”, not a popular pressure.
Critics see China as more anti -Americans and authoritarian President Xi JinpingAnd US officials say that China has a Booming piracy ecosystem to collect intelligence abroad.
Some state officials also began to see China as a specific threat when a The Chinese balloon flew In the United States in 2023, said Sara Newland, an associated government professor at Smith College who conducts research with jaros.
“There is the idea that a Chinese investment will actually result in the Chinese government spying on individuals or threatening food security in a particular area,” he said.
The leader of the majority of the Kansas representatives, Chris Croft, a retired army colonel, said Counter China is a “joint effort” for the United States states and government. He defended a new law that largely limited the property within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of a military installation in Kansas by companies and people linked to foreign adversaries: China, but also Cuba, Iran and North Korea.
“We all have a role to play,” said Croft.
Once again limiting the property of foreign property is still popular, with at least 46 proposals in 24 states, but critics compare imposing restrictions on the sale of snow shovels to Miami residents.
Together, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean and Cuban interests had less than 1% of the 1.27 billion acres of agricultural lands at the end of 2023, according to A report from the United States Department of Agriculture. The participation of Chinese interests was approximately 277,000 acres, or two hundredths of 1%.
And in Arkansas, only the capital of the state of Little Rock is affected by the prohibition of the relations of the sister city.
Doubts about anti-china measures even extend to the conservative North Dakota, where a Chinese company plan to develop cultivation lands near a base of the inspired Air Force Anti-China efforts that extend elsewhere.
Some North Dakota legislators wanted to uninform a state fund that maintained billions of dollars in oil revenues from Chinese companies. But the Senate killed a weaker version of the measure last week.
Republican senator Dale Patten suggested during the debate that the legislators who supported the bill were being inconsistent.
“I guess this body is already very invested in ties that have been manufactured in China, if we want to turn our ties and take a look,” said Patten. “That’s difficult is when we talk about doing something like this.”
Minnich said that if Trump’s tariffs make China restore relations with the United States, that would undermine what states have done. If Trump seeks “sustained decoupling”, state measures will probably have a minimum effect in China in the short term, compared to Trump’s policies, he said.
However, states do not seem to stop.
Joras said they have valid concerns about possible Chinese cyber attacks and if the critical infrastructure depends too much on Chinese teams.
“The vast majority of China’s threats to the United States are in cyberspace,” he said. “Some of those defenses are not yet solid.”
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The writers of Associated Press Andrew Test in Little Rock, Arkansas and Jack Dura, in Bismarck, North Dakota, contributed.
