President Donald Trump is scheduled to speak about China's potential threat to American farms and food supplies at an event in rural Pennsylvania on Monday, event organizers told The Post.
The 45th president has vowed to ban Chinese people from buying U.S. farmland or owning telecommunications, energy, technology and medical supplies companies if he retakes the White House.
Trump is scheduled to visit his family farm in rural Westmoreland County with former New York Rep. Lee Zeldin, a 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate, and former U.S. ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell.
“The Chinese Communist Party is threatening our food supply,” said Zeldin, of the American Conservation Initiative, which organized the event.
Zeldin said the U.S. has lax reporting and policing of foreign companies that buy farms.
“President Trump understood this threat from his time in the White House,” he said.
“China wants us to depend on their supply chain.”
At the worst point of the COVID-19 pandemic, America's dependence on China has been laid bare.
There was a dramatic shortage of personal protective equipment across the country, with most of that supply being manufactured in China rather than the U.S. Some nurses were forced to wear garbage bags due to the lack of PPE.
Zeldin said it was a cruel irony that the U.S. was reliant on protective masks from China, which unleashed the worst pandemic of this century, spreading across the globe and claiming millions of lives in the U.S. and around the world.
The Trump Republican platform includes a section calling for ensuring “strategic independence from China.”
“Republicans will strip China of its most-favored nation status, phase out imports of essential goods, and block Chinese purchases of American real estate and industry,” the Trump Republican Party platform states.
Zeldin said Chinese investments and purchases of U.S. assets would also lead to further espionage.
Companies based in China must comply with compliance requirements to hand over sensitive information to the Communist government.
Linda Sun, a former senior aide to Gov. Kathy Hawkle who previously worked for former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, was recently indicted on charges of acting as an agent for the Chinese government.
