President Trump sparks debate about Chinese students, foreign-owned farmland
President Donald Trump has kicked off some debate online about the ethicality of allowing China to own American farmland and send Chinese students to American universities
by Summer Lane | May 15, 2026
President Donald Trump sparked debate this week during his comments in a new interview centered on the high-level talks in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
While sitting with Fox News’ Sean Hannity for a full conversation about the outcome of the talks, the president responded to two controversial topics: Chinese ownership of American farmland and Chinese students in the American university systems.
“Look, it’s not that I love it,” President Trump said of the Chinese owning American farmland, “but you want to see farm prices drop? You want to see farmers lose a lot of money? Just take that out of the market. But, they’ve had a lot of land for a long time. Obama did nothing about it, they bought a lot of it during the Obama administration.”
According to the USDA, more than 45 million acres of American farmland are owned by foreign investors (as of 2023). And according to the American Farm Bureau, foreign-held agricultural land has grown by 21 million acres since 2010, representing a rapid 85 percent increase in foreign purchases in just 16 years.
“As far as the students, it’s 500,000 students that come,” President Trump continued, pivoting to the issue of Chinese-born students that are embedded into the American university systems – with more to come.
“I could tell [China], I don’t want any students,” President Trump argued. “That’s a very insulting thing to say to a country. They will immediately go out and start building universities all over China. But if you don’t have those students, good students, by the way…if you want to see a university system die, take a half million people out of it.”
His argument remains on par with his previous comments on this subject. Last year, he told Laura Ingraham that his administration’s plan to offer 600,000 visas to Chinese students was essentially based on his belief that refusing foreign students entry to the U.S. university system would kill American colleges.
“If we were to cut that in half, which perhaps makes some people happy, you would have half the colleges in the United States would go out of business,” the president said last fall.
