(The Daily Caller News Foundation)—Top executives at Hong Kong-based WH Group Limited, the world’s largest pork producer that controls vast swaths of U.S. farmland through its American subsidiary, are Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members, according to a Daily Caller News Foundation review of corporate records and state-run media reports.
Records and reports reviewed by the DCNF identify four top executives and the chairman of the pork giant as CCP members with extensive ties to the Chinese government. WH Group controls nearly 150,000 acres of land across 29 U.S. states through its subsidiary Smithfield Foods, a family-run business established in 1936, which it purchased for $7.1 billion in 2013. While a keyword search on Smithfield’s website returned only two articles mentioning the firm’s relationship with WH Group, neither of the two articles mentioned China. An online map of Smithfield’s global business activities does not list any operations in, or connection to, Asia, despite archived reports from their website suggesting otherwise.
Revelations about WH Group’s CCP and Chinese government ties, which the DCNF found by cross-referencing the firm’s roster with Chinese-language news reports and corporate records, come as Republicans push for bans on Chinese rural land purchases, in particular, those close to U.S. military bases.
“It is no joke to join the Chinese Communist Party,” Matt Shoemaker, a former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, told the DCNF. “You cannot just walk in and sign-up. You have to show that you are a true believer.”
Several states, including Florida, have taken legislative and executive action to ban Chinese ownership of U.S. farmland. Recently, Missouri Gov. Mike Parson issued an executive order banning such purchases near military installations. GOP lawmakers also recently pressed the Biden administration to launch an investigation into the second-largest foreign owner of U.S. land after his CCP membership came to light.
“No foreign government should be owning American farmland,” said Shoemaker, who is running for Congress in North Carolina as a Republican. “It is a national security issue, for obvious reasons.”
WH Group’s chairman, Wan Long, as well as multiple board members and some senior management were identified as CCP members in a 2022 Chinese-language stock exchange filing from a subsidiary called Shuanghui Investment and Development Co. (SIDC). WH Group and Chinese corporate records from SIDC also show that WH Group’s chairman and several top executives hold, or previously held, Chinese government positions.
Between 2010 and 2021, the amount of U.S. land owned by Chinese entities skyrocketed from 13,730 acres to 383,935 acres, according to USDA reports.
Smithfield operates half a dozen distribution centers, nearly 20 direct store delivery services, 36 feed mills, as well as more than 40 production plants and 2,400 farms across 29 U.S. states, according to the firm’s website. In total, WH Group owns 146,000 acres in the U.S., according to a 2018 report by the Economic Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“Smithfield Foods, Inc. holds a substantial market share in the U.S. pork industry, accounting for approximately 26% of the total market share,” according to trade publication Essential Protein Trade & Shipping News.
In a bygone era, GOP governors might have welcomed Chinese investment into rural industries and communities. Now, it’s become a major source of concern as relations between the U.S. and China continue to sour.
South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem told the DCNF her office has had “a lot of hard conversations” with Smithfield’s leadership, adding she now believes the company poses a national security threat.
“Any time it felt like we would have the opportunity to work together, it ended up not going as well as I hoped,” Noem said. “I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that Smithfield is owned by China.”
Smithfield did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
‘The CCP’s Long-Term Strategy’
WH Group Chairman Wan Long is among the company’s senior leadership who is a CCP member with Chinese government ties, a DCNF review of corporate business filings and Chinese state media reports found.
An archived business profile on SIDC’s website identifies Wan Long as a CCP member.
SIDC is “the largest animal protein company in Asia” and its products include “chilled fresh pork and packaged meat products,” according to Smithfield’s website.
The DCNF reviewed and carefully translated key sections of SIDC’s Chinese-language website, which contains extensive information about WH Group executives’ CCP and Chinese government ties that are absent from WH Group’s English-language website.
Born in 1940, Wan Long joined the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) at the age of 20 before entering China’s meat industry, according to Chinese state-run media outlet People’s Daily. Wan Long has since earned various Chinese government positions and state awards, his archived SIDC profile states.
Between 1998 and 2018, Wan Long served as a representative to the National People’s Congress, according to his archived SIDC profile. The National People’s Congress operates “under the leadership” of the CCP, and its officials are “invariably influential members of the CCP and leaders of major mass organizations,” according to the Congressional Executive Commission on China.
SIDC’s archived website also notes that Wan Long has received a “special allowance” from China’s State Council. This refers to a reward system created to “strengthen and improve the work of the Party’s intellectuals,” according to the state-run China News Service. The tax-free reward ranges from a monthly stipend of roughly $85 to an approximately $2,800 lump sum payment, according to China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. However, it is unclear if Wan Long still receives this government reward.
Wan Long also earned the honorific “senior political engineer” from the Chinese government, according to his archived SIDC profile. Senior political engineers are required to possess a “relatively systemic grasp of Marxism-Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought and Deng Xiaoping Theory,” according to the State Council’s State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission.
China’s United Front Work Department (UFWD) also named Wan Long as one of 100 “Outstanding Private Entrepreneurs In The 40 Years Of Reform And Opening-Up” in 2018, according to the All-China Federation Of Industry And Commerce, a UFWD subordinate agency that co-sponsored the award.
The UFWD engages in “influence activities and intelligence operations,” according to the House Select Committee on the CCP.
SIDC’s 2022 filing on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange also identifies three WH Group senior managers — Qiao Haili, Wang Yufen, Liu Songtao — and WH Group executive director Ma Xiangjie as CCP members. All four WH Group executives hold high-level positions at SIDC.
Ma Xiangjie was also elected to serve as a National People’s Congress delegate in Henan province, according to that government body’s website. Delegates are elected by “the People’s congresses at the provincial level as well as by the People’s Liberation Army,” according to the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.
A local branch of the All-China Federation Of Industry And Commerce named Ma Xiangjie as one of Henan province’s people of the year between 2019 and 2020, according to the UFWD-affiliate’s website.
Yet, it is unclear just how many CCP members WH Group employs.
SIDC, on the other hand, has employed hundreds, according to the Communist Party Member Network’s website, which is operated by the CCP’s Organization Department.
“In recent years, over 300 new Party members have been recruited, strengthening the Party’s troops,” reads SIDC’s Communist Party Member Network profile. “Currently, Shuanghui Development’s senior executives include 17 Party members, constituting 85% [of all senior executives]; six business department general managers are Party members; six Party members are among the seven management department directors; all project managers are Party members; and 47% of the firm’s mid-level cadre are Party members.”
‘Update CFIUS’
When WH Group purchased Smithfield in 2013, the acquisition “received clearance” from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
CFIUS reviews foreign investments into the U.S. on the grounds of national security, the Treasury Department website states. Multiple U.S. government agencies participate in the CFIUS process, including the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense and others, according to the Treasury Department, which is also involved in that process.
“We are pleased that this transaction has been cleared by CFIUS, and we thank the Committee for its careful attention to this review,” Smithfield’s CEO and president at the time, C. Larry Pope, said at the time, according to an SEC filing.
Over a decade later, House Republicans see CFIUS’ approval of WH Group’s purchase of Smithfield as a case study in why the body needs to be reformed.
“What we need to do is update CFIUS to ensure that it has jurisdiction over all foreign adversary land purchases, and to ensure that it has the ability to consider U.S. food security as a factor in assessing the potential risk of a transaction,” Wisconsin Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who chairs the House Select Committee on the CCP, told the DCNF.
Iowa Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson said the CCP has “nefariously exploited loopholes to buy U.S. land, so they can exert control over our food supply and undermine our national security.”
“This is all part of the CCP’s long-term strategy to hurt America and our interests — whether it’s garnering valuable U.S. military intelligence or interfering with our food supply chain,” Hinson told the DCNF. “We cannot allow another acre of U.S. land to get into the hands of the CCP.”
WH Group, SIDC, Wan Long and CFIUS did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
One imagines they require large amounts of land for their BIOWARFARE LABORATORIES!
PLA General Milley and PLA Admiral Gilday agree with this!