House China Committee To Highlight Communist Influence Over American Auto Industry With Detroit Field Trip
Near the top of the agenda is a recent partnership between Ford and a Chinese electric vehicle battery manufacturer to build a new $3.5 billion plant in Michigan.

While emissaries for the Biden administration are in Beijing talking about “constructive engagement” with China, Republicans in Congress are headed in a different direction with new inquiries into the tangled nexus connecting America’s industrial giants and the Chinese Communist Party.
A bipartisan delegation — consisting of Republicans Mike Gallagher and John Moolenaar, along with Democrats Raja Krishnamoorthi and Haley Stevens — from the House’s Select Committee on the CCP will visit Detroit today for a series of meetings with major automakers and their suppliers about China-related issues, a source on the committee tells the Sun. On tap are meetings with the chief executives of Ford and General Motors, as well as major suppliers such as Bosch, Lonero Engineering, and BorgWarner.
One of the topics sure to come up in the Motor City meetings is a recent partnership between Ford and China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., or CATL, the largest producer of electric vehicle batteries in the world, to build a new $3.5 billion battery plant in Marshall, Michigan. Ford had initially considered building the factory in Virginia, but in January that state’s Governor Youngkin nixed the plan over concerns about Communist Party influence over the company and broader national security concerns.
The Ford-CATL plant would be the first automaker-backed lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, battery plant in America. State officials put up nearly $1 billion in state tax grants and property tax exemptions to lure the project, expected to be complete in 2026 and add 2,500 jobs in the state.
Republicans on the Select Committee have questions about the national security implications of the project given CATL’s close ties to the Communist Party. The founder and chairman of the company, billionaire Zeng Yuqun, also known as Robin Zeng, is said to be a high-ranking member of President Xi’s “United Front” effort to expand China’s global influence.
Committee members have also expressed concern that the new plant will benefit from the tens of billions of dollars in electric vehicle battery manufacturing tax breaks spelled out in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. To qualify for the subsidies, EV batteries must be assembled in the United States primarily from raw material sourced in America or one of 20 free-trade partners around the world. China is not one of those partners.
For its part, Ford has said it is “categorically false” that CATL will receive any taxpayer dollars as part of the venture. The company has said the plant is not a joint venture, and that the American automaker will be the plant’s sole owner and operator. It will, however, license the technology needed to build the batteries from CATL, technology that was initially developed at American universities at taxpayer expense and later sold to the Chinese.
“We are committed to leading the electric vehicle revolution in America, and that means investing in the technology and jobs that will keep us on the cutting edge of this global transformation in our industry,” Ford’s executive chairman, Bill Ford, said when the project was announced in February. “I am also proud that we chose our home state of Michigan for this critical battery production hub.”
At a roundtable with executives from companies that supply the industry, committee members are hoping to drill down on ways to reduce America’s dependence on Chinese suppliers and supplant them with friendlier sources. Committee members are said to be concerned that suppliers from mainland China are heavily subsidized by the Communist government and undercutting American and other allied suppliers. CATL, for example, received subsidies equivalent to one-fifth of its net income in 2020 from Communist Party sources, according to a source on the committee.
There are also concerns coming from the committee about reports that dozens of international auto parts manufacturers in Xinjiang that form part of America’s auto supply chain rely on forced labor from the region’s embattled Uyghur minorities. Ford, General Motors, and Tesla are said to be among the companies exposed to such practices.