Zach Nunn’s China record tested in Iowa’s 3rd District race

Rep. Zach Nunn, R-Iowa, has made a hard line on China central to his record in Congress.

As an airborne U.S. intelligence officer, he flew sorties off China’s coast. In Congress, he has called the competition with China for artificial intelligence supremacy a “new Cold War” and “the Manhattan Project for our generation.”

He has also written about China in fiction, as author of the self-published military novel “Stratagem.” In it, a politically paralyzed U.S. government blindly opens the door for China to absorb Taiwan and to “make Cuba into an unsinkable island battleship just off the coast of the United States.” 

Missed hearings, PAC money and a farmland vote

Nunn’s opponent in the closely watched 3rd Congressional District election, Democratic state Sen. Sarah Trone Garriott, is attacking him on that same issue. Her campaign calls him “weak on China.”

“Being tough on China isn’t a slogan; it’s what you do,” Trone Garriott said in a written statement to Heartland Signal. Not only has Nunn wasted valuable time marketing his novel, the campaign says, he has missed many meetings of a bipartisan House select committee dedicated to countering Chinese Communist Party influence and competition.

While he has campaigned on China, Nunn has missed about half of the select committee’s meetings since joining in February 2025. The Daily Mail reported in June that congressional voting records show Nunn was in town during at least several hearings.

The Trone Garriott campaign also points to Nunn’s vote against the fiscal 2024 Agriculture appropriations bill, which would have directed the U.S. Department of Agriculture to act to prohibit purchases of U.S. farmland by people and businesses tied to China, Russia, North Korea and Iran. It failed 191-237 on Sept. 28, 2023.

Nunn was one of 27 Republicans who voted no, along with Iowa Reps. Randy Feenstra and Ashley Hinson; Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash., who wrote the farmland amendment; and Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Mich., who now chairs the select committee. In May, Nunn co-sponsored a bill to expand national security reviews of foreign land purchases.

Her campaign also notes that, since 2022, Nunn’s campaign and leadership PAC have accepted $17,500 from the employee-funded PAC of Syngenta Corp., plus $1,250 from the PAC of Smithfield Foods, which is owned by Hong Kong-based WH Group. Syngenta was formed in 2000 from Novartis’ and AstraZeneca’s former agribusiness units. State-owned ChemChina bought it in 2017 and later merged with state-owned Sinochem.

PolitiFact Iowa rated Trone Garriott’s claim that Nunn “took thousands from Chinese companies” Half True on Oct. 30, because the money came from PACs tied to U.S. subsidiaries.

What Nunn has done on China

Nunn’s campaign did not reply to requests for comment. A campaign spokesperson told Iowa Capital Dispatch in August that he has spent his career “confronting the CCP,” citing 27 bills signed into law.

In August, he joined Reps. Kathy Castor, D-Fla., and Carlos Gimenez, R-Fla., in urging Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins and U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer to protect domestic fertilizer production and develop a supply-chain strategy that accounts for Chinese market manipulation.

He introduced a bill, the Neutralizing Unfair Chinese Export Subsidies Act, last year seeking China’s compliance with OECD export credit standards. It never went to a floor vote.

He also called for the formation of another dedicated committee to focus on Chinese propaganda, “and the way that it is softening the battle space for what will surely become a kinetic conflict if we don’t stop it early.” To date, that hasn’t happened.

How the committee works

Some of the claims against Nunn aren’t that simple. For example, if Nunn was an absentee member of his committee, he was hardly alone. A scan of hearing videos recorded since Nunn joined shows that most members are perpetually absent. Those who show up usually leave after asking questions of witnesses. 

Even when absent, Nunn has often submitted questions in writing that received written replies from the committee witnesses. 

Nunn took the unusual step in September of penning a letter to the committee’s chair explaining his absence from that month’s meeting. He was in another committee hearing at the time, he said. There is no other such letter in the committee archives.

Karen M. Kedrowski, a political science professor at Iowa State University in Ames, said absences like these are more the norm than the exception in Congress, and not because people are skipping work. On the contrary, most are constantly double- and triple-booked, Kedrowski said. 

“The notion that he is not working or that he is sitting around in his office or something is almost undoubtedly untrue,” she said.

China as a pocketbook issue

The focus on China is unusual for a congressional district race, the professor said. Generally, pocketbook issues are much more to the fore. 

Kedrowski said the two are connected. Trump’s tariffs, which Nunn has repeatedly voted to keep in place, have had a crushing effect on Iowa’s economy, she said, suppressing soybean and other exports while pushing farm equipment, fuel and fertilizer prices higher.

Kedrowski suspects Trone Garriott’s focus on China is not really a matter of foreign policy. Instead, China serves as a mnemonic device for voters, reminding them of what matters most: their thinning wallets, according to Kedrowski.

“It is important,” she said, “not because China is any sort of military threat. But as a trading partner, China gets to sort of pocketbook issues that really drive voters and their vote choices. So that’s where they are building the bridge.”