Lawmaker Raises Concern Over CCP-Linked Project Near US Military Base

The rural Michigan community of Green Charter Township was to become home to a Chinese EV battery plant. Courtesy of Jim Chapman

A Republican lawmaker has raised concern over the construction of a China-linked project near a Michigan military base.

On April 20, a Michigan Senate committee approved spending $175 million in state money to build a facility that Chinese manufacturer Gotion had planned for northern Michigan.

The $2.4 billion EV battery project, set to be built on a large site in Big Rapids, Michigan, will be located just 100 miles from Camp Grayling—the Michigan National Guard training center.

Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) sounded the alarm about the proximity of the project to the base, where he said the Michigan National Guard is reportedly training the Taiwanese military.

“We are partnering with Taiwanese military leadership to make sure they can defend themselves from possible invasion from the Chinese military operation. And so the idea that we’re going to have a company within 100 miles that has an affiliation and has a duty to respond to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), that is a concern,” Moolenaar told “China in Focus” on NTD, the sister media outlet of The Epoch Times.

The lawmaker said he had asked the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to investigate whether or not this factory is a security risk.

“We received a very lukewarm response, and they said they were taking it under consideration,” he said of the appeal.

“I feel that they are not taking this as seriously as they should. I think this process needs to be transparent. And we need to understand the threats that we face whenever there’s foreign investment … And I think we need to be very straightforward and forthright with the American people,” he added. “That’s why I’m a co-sponsor of legislation to ban farmland from being purchased by entities affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party.”

China Benefits

The Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden last August, seeks to direct spending, tax credits, and loans to bolster technology such as solar panels and equipment to reduce pollution at coal- and gas-powered power plants.

The top-line price of the legislation’s climate policies is around $369 billion.

The bill emphasizes tax incentives for companies and individuals who switch to renewable energy sources.

Moolenaar said that Chinese companies tend to benefit immensely from these subsidies.

“I think some of this is playing right into China’s hands where they are dominant in battery technology. They have been strategic about the rare earth minerals that are needed. And we’re playing on their field because of this rush to electrification,” he contended.

Given the communist regime’s military-civil fusion approach, the ultimate beneficiary would be the Chinese military, in his opinion.

“Everything is subservient to the Chinese Communist Party. So anytime there’s a myth that there’s this Chinese private sector, it is simply a tool of the leadership in China for whatever their economic [or] military purposes are,” he said.

He cited the Gotion project as an example, saying, “Right in its articles of association, it says that the company and its subsidiaries have a responsibility to the Chinese Communist Party, and to set up operations that support those efforts and to support the CCPs constitution.”

Partnership With CCP Is Risky

On a broader note, in his opinion, partnering with the CCP in any way adds a tremendous amount of risk, including economic, military, and national security risks.

He pointed to the Chinese spy balloons incident, saying that despite the CCP’s claim that they were simply errant balloons, weather balloons, they were actually highly sophisticated balloons that were spying on military operations.

“And when you consider how they stonewalled with respect to COVID, didn’t help us identify the origins of that, as well as these recently two Chinese CCP affiliated people in New York who are residents, they’re arrested because they set up spying stations, police stations to intimidate dissidents of the Chinese Communist Party,” he said. “So you can see they’re very active in this country, and we need to be vigilant and protect our national security.”

As for the trend of partnerships between U.S. companies and Chinese ones, the lawmaker suggested that “our private sector needs to realize that they are taking tremendous risks to rely on an unreliable partner in the future.”

“They have a 50-year plan to become dominant, both militarily as well as economically, and they are not looking out for America’s interests. We should be partnering with friendly nations, nations that we can work with that respect the rule of law, that are transparent,” he said.

He pointed to the report on how the Chinese cartels are smuggling fentanyl into the U.S. southern border. Fentanyl is now the leading cause of death for 18- to 45-year-olds in the United States, according to a Georgetown Behavioral Hospital report.

“The Chinese are developing and using the precursors, the chemicals that make that fentanyl and sending them to the cartels. And they denied doing this, but we know factually that that’s happening.

“And we should never be partnering with a company or a country that’s complicit in really killing our young people,” Moolenaar said.

Jack Phillips contributed to this report.