By Michael Kohn – Bend Bulletin
Rarely does a tract of forest in Central Oregon make national headlines. But that is precisely what occurred recently when Skyline Forest — a 33,000-acre privately owned wooded area west of Bend — became central to heated debate over land owned by foreign entities.
The property at the center of the debate — Bull Springs Skyline Forest — is owned by Shanda Asset Management, LLC, a California-based company founded by Chinese billionaire Tianqiao Chen.
Chen, a former member of the Chinese Communist Party, has drawn fire since details of his property holdings were revealed in an article published by The Daily Caller, a right-wing news and opinion website. Among foreign landowners in the U.S., Chen is second only to the Irving family of Canada, which owns 1.2 million acres of Maine timberland.
That fact did not sit well with several U.S. lawmakers who are increasingly wary of Chinese investors doing business in the United States amid destabilizing relations between the two countries.
Chen has owned the property since 2015, when he bought 198,000 acres of forest land in Oregon from Fidelity National Financial Ventures for $85 million.
Revelations of Chen’s landholdings were shared widely on social media and picked up by other tabloids, sparking outrage by individuals opposed to land ownership by an adversary.
Deep concern
The reports were echoed by Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, R-Happy Valley, who issued a statement saying she is “deeply concerned that a member of the Chinese Communist Party owns tens of thousands of forestland acres” in her district.
Chavez-DeRemer is a cosponsor of the Stop CCP Land Act, legislation designed to prevent “foreign adversaries” including China and Russia, from buying U.S. agricultural land, defined as any land located in one or more States and used for agricultural, forestry, or timber production purposes.
The freshman lawmaker is also a cosponsor of the Protecting America’s Agricultural Land from Foreign Harm Act, another bill that seeks to block investment by individuals connected to the Chinese government.
“With conflict and uncertainty on the rise around the world, including aggressive rhetoric and actions from China, we cannot hesitate to stand up to bad actors,” Chavez-DeRemer said in the release.
On Thursday, Chavez-DeRemer issued another statement calling on the Biden administration to review the 2015 sale.
“Our adversaries are taking advantage of current loopholes in CFIUS’ jurisdiction to increase their ownership of U.S. agricultural land, strengthen their agricultural production, and weaken America’s agricultural supply chains,” Chavez-DeRemer said in a letter to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Montana Senator Jon Tester, D-Mon., took a similar position on reports of Chen’s large landholdings. On Jan. 12, Tester wrote to Yellen and U.S. Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack asking that their departments investigate the 2015 transaction.
Ron Wyden, D-Ore., Oregon’s senior senator, did not directly address Chen’s ownership of forest land in Oregon when asked by The Bulletin, instead saying that anyone purchasing land in the United States must “follow the letter of the law” so federal regulators can conduct thorough reviews.
“I will continue to watchdog these reviews, and I look forward to working with my colleagues and the administration if there are opportunities to improve oversight and truly strengthen national security,” Wyden said.
Commercial logging
Shanda has conducted forest thinning and timber harvests on the property since acquiring the land from Fidelity, which itself took ownership of the forest in 2006. At the time of the purchase, Shanda was known as Whitefish Cascade Forest Resources.
Previous owners logged the largest trees making large-scale commercial logging, for now, challenging.
“I think it’s more like investment right now — investing in resiliency and in future stand conditions more favorable to saw log production,” said Phil Chang, a Deschutes County commissioner whose background is in natural resource management.
In the past, Skyline Forest has been open to recreational opportunities. It’s currently closed to the public to manage fire risks throughout the year, according to the company.
Shanda tried to sell the property — known locally as the Tree Farm — in 2019 with an asking price of $127 million. In 2022, Shanda cut the price to $95 million.
Ben Gordon, executive director of Central Oregon LandWatch, said private ownership of Skyline Forest makes its future “very uncertain.”
Gordon advocates for local stewardship of the property to maintain public access and wildfire safety. Local stewardship will help to prevent large-scale, luxury development, he said.
Chen, 50, has a net worth of $1 billion, according to Forbes, mainly through his online gaming empire. He and his wife are both U.S. green card holders, said Jason Reindorp, a spokesperson for Shanda. They reside in Atherton, California.
The Chens are active philanthropists, donating around $115 million to brain research at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
Reindorp acknowledged in an email that Chen had been a member of the Chinese Communist Party but left it in 2017, the same year he moved to California. Between the years of 2009 and 2017, Chen lived in Singapore.
“His CCP membership lapsed after living outside China since 2010,” said Reindorp. He has a “nonactive working relationship with the CCP given how long they’ve lived outside China.”
Since his arrival in the U.S., Chen has purchased homes in several states, including a $25 million mansion in Los Angeles and a $39 million home in New York City.
Shanda added that its purchase of the property was above board and it had even requested a review of the acquisition by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The agency concluded its review with no findings of national security concerns according to documentation reviewed by The Bulletin.
Local response
Locally, the response to the media frenzy over Skyline Forest’s ownership has been muted.
Deschutes County Commissioner Tony DeBone said concerns over foreign ownership of private land is a discussion to be carried out at the federal or state levels.
Chang, the other county commissioner who has commented on the matter, said ownership by Shanda has probably been beneficial for Bend from an environmental perspective because development has been averted.
The prior owner, Fidelity, made repeated efforts to get legislative approval for a destination resort-like development on the property, said Chang. Their efforts were thwarted by Oregon’s land use planning system which prioritizes the conservation of farm and forest land.
Chen’s purchase of the approximately 200,000 acres of land that Fidelity held in Central and South Central Oregon came with an expression of interest to hold and manage the land as private industrial timberland.
“It was a relief to many who were concerned about conversion of this block of working lands to a fragmented rural residential landscape in a highly fire-vulnerable area,” said Chang.
Shanda’s ownership has removed some layers of stress that environmentalists had during Fidelity’s period of ownership.
“If a period of foreign investor ownership has helped to prevent conversion of this working forest to low-density rural residential development then for these eight years maybe foreign ownership can be viewed as a positive,” Chang said.