A Chinese firm run by a former officer in the People’s Liberation Army has purchased 130,000 acres of land in Texas which is situated near one of the busiest Air Force pilot training bases in the nation, an analyst said.
If this seems like it might be an issue for U.S. national security, read on.
Sun Guangxin, who has close ties to the Chinese Communist Party, purchased the land allegedly to build wind farms, Kyle Bass, founder and principal of Hayman Capital Management and a founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, told Epoch TV in a recent interview.
The wind farm project, known as the Blue Hills Wind development, is being managed by GH America Energy, the U.S. subsidiary of Sun Guangxin's Guanghui Energy Company.
The land area, 130,000 acres, is 200 square miles. It is near Laughlin Air Force Base.
"Just think about that for a second, 200 square miles of property. We have a Chinese general who owns two-thirds of the real estate in the capital of Xinjiang where the concentration camps are for the ethnic Uyghurs. And he now owns 200 square miles of Texas land between one of our most active Air Force bases and the border of the U.S. and Mexico," Bass noted.
"You’ve got a former People’s Liberation Army general billionaire who has bought over 130,000 acres of Texan land, including a giant wind farm in an area where there isn’t particularly a lot of wind but happens to be right beside a very sensitive U.S. military installation," Bass said.
Bass said he had visited the Devil’s River area of Texas where the land purchased by Sun Guangxin is located.
"When you think about the Texas map, it’s the southern region of Texas where the bend is essentially, just south of where that bend is and it’s right on the U.S. border with Mexico which also is actually functionally relevant or germane to this conversation."
Bass said there is a "4,000 or 5,000-foot runway there where the Chinese general is expanding it to, we think, 10,000 feet. This is happening inside the United States, and this general is actually interfacing directly with the critical infrastructure of the United States. My view and this is my view only, not our country view yet, but my view is the reason that he bought the wind farm and wants to put up 700-foot turbines is he plugs directly into our electric grid."
Bass continued: "Plugging directly into our electric grid is something that should never happen. Whether you’re a Chinese general or a North Korean general or an Iranian general or a Russian general, you should be precluded from buying property next to our busiest Air Force training base and plugging directly into our grid."
The name of the property purchased by the Chinese firm is called the Morning Star Ranch.
"And if you remember in the Bible, the devil’s name is Lucifer Morning Star. And you should see the obtuse star that denotes the landmark of this ranch. Again, it’s almost made for TV fiction. You couldn’t make this up if you try," Bass said.
Bass said he investigated and "realized that on a scale of 1 to 10, the wind assets in that region of the United States and Southern Texas is like between 2 and 3 out of 10. And if you and I were investing and buying big wind turbines and wanted to put them somewhere, we’d look for two things. We would look for major wind factors. And then we’d also look for transmission equipment to be able to transmit it somewhere to sell it. We would never build a wind farm where this one is."
There is a strategic reason a former PLA general would acquire all of this land, "and he did it again in an insidious way," Bass said. "He got a local businessman out of Lufkin, Texas to front for him and purchase all the properties. So none of the landowners knew they were selling to a Chinese general. And then in all one fell swoop, they flipped it to the general."
Sun Guangxin's two closest advisers "are also ex-PLA generals. He runs 40 local branches of the CCP, grassroots branches. We’ve done some investigations into this General Sun. And again, it’s hard to believe but it’s happening," Bass said. "And when you see this runway expansion, you wonder why on earth? It looks like one of those runways on the islands of the South China Sea, all the islands that China claimed they would never militarize. Xi Jinping said to President Obama, 'We’ll never militarize those islands.' The next thing you know, they’ve got missile batteries and fighter jets and bombers on these 10,000-foot runways."
Bass continued: "In remote areas of the United States, people that have large landholdings will sometimes build their own landing strips. The enormity of this particular strip is a head scratcher because you can land just about every single, even very large private plane, on a runway that’s 6,000 feet long or less. My pilots said that this runway looked like it was about 10,000 feet long, so it was abnormally large.
"But again, why are we allowing people from China, Russia, Iran or North Korea to build runways in the United States next to our border or next to our air bases? They are 10 miles from this air base. 10 miles is nothing. Think about in an airplane traveling 600 miles an hour. How long does that take to get to 10 miles? Literally a handful of seconds."
As for the relevance of the wind farm, Bass noted that "it interfaces and plugs directly in the Texas power grid. Everyone is aware of what happened in January with the Texas power grid and how Texas is the only state that runs its own grid. The United States has a purview or regulatory oversight over the rest of the grids. Texas happens to be proud of their grid, and it doesn’t want the U.S. interfering with their grid and yet, we have a Chinese PLA general plugging directly into our grid."
Bass continued: "Now, there are plenty of instances of malware. If you look at the GAO [Government Accountability Office] report that was recently released ... we are fully certain that the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans, and the Iranians want to disrupt our critical infrastructure. We are certain that they want to do that and that they have the capacity to do it. We mustn’t ever allow them to interface directly with these things, whether it is our layer one phone systems, layer one phone interconnections on the telco site, or whether it’s our waste and water treatment system, or our nuclear power systems, our nuclear power plants, or our electric grids. We just need to keep them out. It’s a basic understanding of how you protect national security."
Sun Guangxin has also reportedly filed an application to build 700-foot tall wind turbines on the land.
"Just to put that into perspective, that’s as tall as the Washington Monument," Bass noted. "Just think about how big that is. And if you put these, they call them over-the-top transponders on top of these 700-foot turbines, you have direct line of sight into our Air Force base. You have direct line of sight to the border. You can disrupt all kinds of things."
Bass continued: "You can also map. You can do horizon mapping. You can map within 40 miles of the over-the-top network and you can map anything that flies by or drives by perfectly. So every single airplane that we’re flying, testing, they can figure out what the performance characteristics of it are to the T. They know what our air base will look like to the T."
Bass added that "what China is so good at doing in the United States is exploiting every kind of crack and crevice that we have in our open society and our democracy and our rule of law."
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