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Fears that Chinese billionaire Zhong Shanshan planned to buy his way into controlling Nashua’s water supply are giving way to tentative relief, with officials keeping a wary eye on a deal.

The good news, says Pennichuck Water, is that the potential deal with Zhong’s Nongfu Spring could ultimately lower residential water bills.

But state and local officials are less than thrilled that the international customer is based in China, which has an adversarial relationship with the U.S., and where companies are under the thumb of the Communist regime.

In February, Nongfu Spring secretly bought a $67 million industrial property in Nashua close to the Pennichuck Pond watershed, sparking concern about the future of Pennichuck Water, the utility owned by the City of Nashua. But C. George Bower, chairman of Pennichuck’s board of directors, told NHJournal there is no plan to sell Zhong anything but water.

“There is zero plan to sell the company, there is zero plan to sell any land. We have no land to sell,” Bower said.

Zhong’s close ties to the authoritarian Chinese Communist government, his company’s less-than-stellar environmental record, and the secrecy surrounding the Nashua plant generated alarm throughout the state. The company declined to respond to questions from NH Journal about the unusual property purchase or its plans in Nashua.

Gov. Kelly Ayotte told NHJournal that she would be watching the deal to make sure Nongfu remains a Pennichuck customer and not a Pennichuck owner.

“It’s critical that we safeguard New Hampshire from foreign adversaries like China. We need to ensure we aren’t allowing any national security threat to take root in our state,” Ayotte said.

According to Forbes, Zhong is worth $58 billion, making him the wealthiest man in China. In addition to owning Nongfu Spring, China’s biggest maker of bottled water, he also controls Wantai Biological, which makes rapid diagnostic tests for infectious diseases, including COVID-19.

Nongfu and Pennichuck are in the preliminary stages of deal negotiations, Bower said, but just for water. Zhong wants up to two million gallons a day for his planned beverage plant at his new 80 Northwest Blvd. property. That’s good news for Pennichuck, its owners, and its customers, Bower said. 

Pennichuck has the capacity to produce up to 35 million gallons per day, Bower said, more than enough to accommodate Nongfu’s planned operations. Any costs associated with hooking Nongfu up to Pennichuck’s water system, like adding new water lines, would be borne by the company.

A large-scale, industrial customer like Nongfu would lock into a contract that guarantees a set amount of water per month for the customer. Bower said such deals also require the customer to pay for all the water, whether they use it or not, giving Pennichuck a consistent, new revenue source.

It gets better for Pennichuck. As part of its conservation efforts, Pennichuck charges commercial and industrial customers on a rising scale, meaning the more water they buy, the higher the rate goes. Adding Nongfu as a customer could help drive down costs for Pennichuck and everyone in the Pennichuck system.

“We have fixed costs and variable costs, and a contract like this brings in an ongoing revenue stream that could help us control rates,” Bower said.

That means Pennichuck’s thousands of residential water customers throughout southern New Hampshire could end up paying less for their drinking water, Bower said.

Adding Nongfu to the system is the same as adding any other commercial or industrial customer, Bower insisted. Pennichuck already supplies water for the Anheuser-Busch brewery in Merrimack, which Belgian beverage conglomerate InBev owns.

Granite Staters concerned by a Chinese billionaire buying a large facility near Nashua’s water supply say the issue isn’t xenophobia. Many international businesses are active in New Hampshire. Instead, it’s the specific threat posed by China.

“Water is one of our most vital resources – to have a business, backed by the CCP, accessing water in our backyard is alarming,” said former state Rep. Randy Whitehead. “City officials and the Pennichuck Corporation need to come clean and provide some answers about this deal.”

Sen. Regina Birdsell (R-Hampstead) has proposed legislation to stop Chinese companies from owning land near sensitive military sites in the state.

“Whether it’s flying spy balloons across our country or scooping up critical plots of U.S. real estate, China has stepped up its efforts to spy on our country,” Birdsell said when she proposed the legislation. “Other hostile nations, such as Russia, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, could try the same surveillance tactics unless we do something to stop them. Totalitarian nations do not see any difference between one of their citizens’ companies and the government itself.”

The prospect that Pennichuck could be bought by a foreign individual or entity is alarming, and the reason that the City of Nashua now owns the utility. 

“When the city bought Pennichuck, it really did to secure the water supply,” Bower said.

Nashua waged a decade-long battle to buy Pennichuck, closing the $200 million deal in 2012. The city took action after watching the old owners of Pennichuck risk the future security of the region’s water supply. The former owners sold off wetlands to commercial developers and were even considering a purchase offer from a French company when Nashua stepped in. Today, Pennichuck continues to operate as a for-profit utility corporation, but it reports to a single shareholder, the City of Nashua. 

China’s largest beverage company, Nongfu Spring, is setting up operations in Nashua after spending $67 million on an industrial building.

But the property’s location, adjacent to the Pennichuck watershed area that supplies drinking water for the city, raises questions about where Nongfu will get its H2O.

Pennichuck Pond

Recent developments have sparked public concern about the potential sale of Nashua’s water resources to a foreign entity. A significant real estate transaction and subsequent hiring activities have brought those issues to the forefront, prompting questions about the future of the city’s water supply.

According to online records, in February 2025, STAG Industrial sold a 337,391-square-foot industrial property at 80 Northwest Boulevard in Nashua for a staggering $67 million, despite online assessments valuing the property at approximately $15 million. The buyer was not officially disclosed, leading to speculation about foreign involvement. However, recent job postings on LinkedIn indicate that Nongfu Spring, a major Chinese bottled water company, is actively hiring for positions at that location.

Nongfu sells bottled water, tea, juices, and other drinks. It was one of the first private beverage companies to emerge in China in the 1990s and helped make its owner, Zhong Shanshan, the richest man in China with a net worth of around $65 billion. 

Zhong and Nongfu came under fire last year in China when nationalist activists there deemed the billionaire was not patriotic enough. It’s not clear how much the boycott was the work of so-called nationalists or part of a pressure campaign brought by the authoritarian government against Zhong. However, it’s well known that China’s Communist Party (CCP) exerts a strong influence over businesses operating within the country, both domestically and foreign. 

That’s one reason state Senate Majority Leader Regina Birdsell (R-Hampstead) has proposed legislation to prevent agents of the Chinese government from buying and owning land near sensitive military locations in the state.

The concern in the Gate City isn’t war fighters, but water.

Across the road from Nongfu’s new beverage plant is the Pennichuck Pond, one of many ponds in the Pennichuck water system that serves as Nashua’s main water source. 

Nashua’s water supply is managed by the Pennichuck Corporation, a semi-private water company controlled by the city. Nashua purchased Pennichuck in 2012 in a unique $200 million deal that left the corporate structure in place but positioned the city as the sole shareholder. 

The deal took 10 years and multiple trips to court to go through. The push to buy Pennichuck started in the early 2000s when it was learned that a French company planned to buy a controlling interest in the water supplier. City leaders acted to keep local control of the water. 

But prior to the possible foreign owner controversy, city leaders were unhappy with Pennichuck’s management, which had been selling off hundreds of acres of land to developers. The purchase was also a way for Nashua to keep Pennichuck’s land for water use, and not for building.

The upcoming Pennichuck Board of Directors meeting on May 21, 2025, has locals wondering if they will discuss and vote on any measures related to Pennichuck Pond, the water supply, and any deals related to these recent transactions. Current Board Chair C. George Bower did not respond to a request for comment about the upcoming meeting.

Pennichuck is based in Nashua and supplies water to communities throughout southern New Hampshire. Pennichuck serves approximately 40,000 customers using water from the Pennichuck watershed and the Merrimack River. It generates more than $50 million a year in revenue against $40 to $45 million in expenses.

New Hampshire Attorney General John Formella says he believes the TikTok app is hurting children and teens and adding fuel to the nation’s youth mental health crisis. Now he has joined a national effort by his fellow attorneys general demanding more transparency from a company known for its ties to China’s communist regime.

Last December, Gov. Chris Sununu signed an executive order banning TikTok from state-issued smartphones.

On Monday, Formella joined 46 other state attorneys general in asking a Tennessee judge to order the company to open up its internal communications for review. 

“Our youth spend hours on social media platforms each day. We already know that on TikTok they are being exposed to harmful content including, but certainly not limited to, potentially deadly viral challenges, bullying, and graphic content showcasing sexual images and drug use,” Formella said. 

The Tennessee lawsuit has become a national fight as evidence mounts that too many children and teens are ending up with mental health disorders because of social media addictions enabled by the tech giants. Parents and communities need to act to protect children, and states need to get involved, too, according to Formella.

Attorney General John Formella

“As we work to help parents better protect their children online, we must be able to thoroughly investigate and understand the methods and techniques utilized by TikTok to boost young user engagement, including how the company specifically works to increase the duration of time spent on the platform as well as the frequency of engagement with the platform,” he said.

The attorneys general want to review internal TikTok communications to see if the company engaged in deceptive, unfair, and unconscionable conduct that harmed the mental health of TikTok users, particularly children and teens. The company has been stalling, handing over useless data and even deleting records, according to claims made in court documents.

The amicus brief signed by Formella and his counterparts claims TikTok employees use a messaging system called Lark for internal communications, and that the employees have the app set to erase the content.

“TikTok has flouted its duty to preserve communications and provide them in an unusable format. They have instead continued to allow employees to send auto-deleting messages over the Lark platform after the start of the investigation and have provided messages to the states in a format that is difficult to use and navigate,” according to Formella’s statement.

 Congress could move this week to give President Joe Biden the authority to institute a national ban on the app, which is considered a national security threat.

“TikTok is the Chinese Communist Party’s backdoor into American phones,” Texas Republican Rep. Michael McCaul, the House Foreign Affairs Committee chair who is behind the law authorizing Biden to ban apps and software nationally.

TikTok is owned by the Chinese company ByteDance, which has ties to China’s Communist government. There are concerns about TikTok gathering intelligence data on Americans, as well as the app giving an authoritarian and hostile China the ability to easily disseminate misinformation.

FBI Director Christopher Wray considers the app a potential threat.

“All of these things are in the hands of a government that doesn’t share our values, and that has a mission that’s very much at odds with what’s in the best interests of the United States. That should concern us,” Wray said.

Formella is focusing on the impact TikTok is having on teens and preteens, especially girls. 

“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released findings demonstrating a startling increase in challenges to youth mental health, youth experiences of violence, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors among teenagers, especially teenage girls. This includes a finding that nearly one-third of teen girls seriously considered suicide in 2021, a nearly 60 percent increase from a decade prior,” Formella said in the statement.

A TikTok spokeswoman noted Congress passed a ban on the app from federal devices in December, dismissing it as “little more than political theater.”

“The swiftest and most thorough way to address any national security concerns about TikTok is for CFIUS to adopt the proposed agreement that we worked with them on for nearly two years. These plans have been developed under the oversight of our country’s top national security agencies, and we are well underway in implementing them to further secure our platform in the United States,” she said.

Some analysis finds TikTok is replacing Google as a top source for information, including news, among Gen Z consumers.

State employees won’t be able to use the video-sharing social media app TikTok now that Gov. Chris Sununu has signed an executive order outlawing the service from state-issued smartphones. 

“New Hampshire is joining the growing list of states that have banned TikTok and other Chinese companies from state government devices and networks. This move will help preserve the safety, security, and privacy of the citizens of New Hampshire,” Sununu said.

The order banning the tech, linked to the Chinese Communist Party, was signed on Wednesday.

Sununu’s decision is supported by House Speaker Sherm Packard (R-Londonderry) who told NHJournal, “There’s no way in hell TikTok should be on any state-owned device.”

Several states with Republican governors have banned the software from government-issued phones, including Maryland, South Carolina, South Dakota and Utah. And Indiana is suing TikTok, claiming the app exposes children to harmful content.

TikTok is popular with teens and Gen Z, but it carries a known security risk. TikTok’s Chinese parent company, ByteDance, is required by Chinese law to make the app’s data available to the Chinese Communist Party.

This week Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) was successful in getting the Senate to pass a measure banning the app from federal government-issued phones and devices. 

Rubio says his Averting the National Threat of Internet Surveillance, Oppressive Censorship and Influence, and Algorithmic Learning by the Chinese Communist Party Act (ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act) would protect Americans by blocking and prohibiting all transactions from any social media company in, or under the influence of, China, Russia, and several other foreign countries of concern.

“This isn’t about creative videos — this is about an app that is collecting data on tens of millions of American children and adults every day,” Rubio said in a statement. “We know it’s used to manipulate feeds and influence elections. We know it answers to the People’s Republic of China. There is no more time to waste on meaningless negotiations with a CCP-puppet company. It is time to ban Beijing-controlled TikTok for good.” 

Rubio’s bill now goes to the House of Representatives.

New Hampshire cannot ban the app from private users, but it can control what goes on to the phones it hands out to state employees. Individual New Hampshire state agencies are responsible for issuing iPhones to employees to use for state business purposes, but all the phones are controlled through the DoIT.

Denis Goulet, commissioner for the Department of Information Technology, said Thursday the state already prohibits the use of the app on the state-issued iPhones.

“We hadn’t been allowing TikTok on our state devices anyway,” Goulet said.

Goulet said employees already agree not to use TikTok as part of the agreement when they are issued their phones. All non-state business is already banned. “Stuff that is clearly non-business, or things that are inappropriate, or things that are a risk are proscribed,” Goulet noted.

Asked about Sununu’s move, House Majority Leader Jason Osborne simply replied, “I am going to miss the daily dance videos from the Insurance Department.”