California Governor Gavin Newsom (D.) received $50,000 in campaign contributions from a Chinese electric-vehicle executive whose company the Pentagon blacklisted this week over its ties to China’s military. [some emphasis, links added]
Li Ke, a Chinese national who serves as the executive vice president of the China-based BYD Company and president of its subsidiary BYD Americas, donated $20,000 to Newsom’s gubernatorial campaign in 2018 before giving another $30,000 to his 2022 reelection effort, according to California campaign finance disclosures reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
That’s more money than Li has ever spent supporting all other California candidates combined. (Federal law allows foreign nationals who have obtained a green card to donate to any federal, state, or local campaign.)
Since Li—who is also known as Stella Li and is reportedly married to BYD’s billionaire founder and CEO Wang Chuanfu, a member of the Chinese Communist Party and ally of Chinese president Xi Jinping—made the donations, Newsom has cultivated a close relationship with BYD, providing friendly government contracts worth billions to the company and even commending it during a visit to its Shenzhen, China, headquarters in 2023.
“Who needs a car when you can have a car and a boat?” Newsom joked during that visit after test-driving a BYD model that floats, alongside company executives.
The Free Beacon reported last year that a left-wing foundation, with a history of supporting Chinese climate initiatives, sponsored the trip, resulting in numerous deals between California and Chinese state-run entities.
But on Monday, the Pentagon formally classified BYD as a Chinese military company.
With that action, the company joins a list, which defense officials first assembled in 2021 and have regularly updated, of Chinese companies operating in the United States and contributing to Beijing’s strategy to leverage private-sector technology to boost its military might.
The designation raises serious national security questions about BYD’s support for Newsom’s campaign and puts a fresh spotlight on Newsom’s close relationship with the company.
It also confirms what experts and lawmakers warned about BYD, even before Newsom accepted Li’s donations.
“China’s always looking for a weak link, and I think that they found a weak link in Governor Newsom,” said former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Cella, the president of the Secure Our States Coalition, a group he founded to combat Chinese influence in America. “Governor Newsom has a naive view of the CCP—he almost has an affinity or grossly imprudent tolerance of their ways.”
“The Department of War has blacklisted BYD for a reason,” Cella told the Free Beacon in an interview. ”It means that there is a threat to the national security of the United States.”
Newsom’s office and BYD did not respond to requests for comment.
For more than a decade, the Chinese government has heavily subsidized BYD with billions of dollars in incentives, while China’s military has provided significant research support for the company, helping establish it as the world’s largest EV maker.
According to the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, BYD’s dominance of global EV markets is an outgrowth of the Chinese Communist Party’s “Made in China 2025” plans issued over a decade ago, which emphasized the importance of the nation dominating EV supply chains.
Read rest at Free Beacon
BYD maintains a significant physical presence in California through its North American subsidiaries. The company operates its North American headquarters in Downtown Los Angeles and owns a 550,000-square-foot bus manufacturing facility in Lancaster, California. This factory employs unionized American workers to build buses that meet federal domestic-sourcing requirements
The political contributions connected to BYD executives and campaigns involving California Governor Gavin Newsom were legal under existing campaign finance laws.