On Tuesday, Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that the United States needs to \u201cdisentangle\u201d its economy from China, and that China\u2019s influence on U.S. society has been \u201cvery insidious.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cI know your administration is looking into not only banning China from buying farmland but also just any Florida property,\u201d a reporter said to DeSantis. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cMy view on our economy in Florida is we don\u2019t want to have holdings by hostile nations, and so if you look at the Chinese Communist Party, they\u2019ve been very active throughout the Western hemisphere in gobbling up land and investing in different things,\u201d DeSantis responded<\/a>. \u201cYou know, when they have interests that are opposed to ours, and you see how they\u2019ve wielded their authority, and especially with President Xi, who has taken a much more Marxist-Leninist turn since he has been ruling China, that is not in the best interests of Florida to have the Chinese Communist Party owning farmland, land close to military bases.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI think there\u2019s broad agreement on those two, but my view is yeah, no farmland, but why would you want them buying residential developments or things like that? I don\u2019t want them owning subdivisions or things like that because their influence on our society has been very insidious,\u201d he added. \u201cIf you look, they\u2019re very powerful in entertainment, they\u2019re very powerful in finance. Even Disney. You will have some of these companies change things to be able to placate the CCP. Wall Street will bend to placate the CCP. But it is a larger issue. And we\u2019re a pretty big fish now, I think [Florida] is the 14th or 15th biggest economy in the world if we were our own country, so we\u2019re a force to be reckoned with. But in the broader U.S. economy, we\u2019re way too intertwined with China economically. And it hurts us, it hurts our economic vitality. It hurts our security.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n DeSantis then pointed to the problems caused by the U.S. economy\u2019s reliance on China during the beginning of the pandemic, saying, \u201cWhen Covid hit, people needed all those supplies and I think like 100% of it was made in China. Why would you want to rely on a hostile nation for things that are integral for our quality of life and security? Of course, you wouldn\u2019t want to do that. But this has been going on for many, many decades.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSo disentangling from China is something that will be very significant going forward. And you\u2019re not going to see people acknowledge that,\u201d he concluded.<\/p>\n\n\n\n