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.
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, which resulted in a number of 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 that operate in the United States and contribute 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 to the company, helping it to establish itself 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 that emphasized the importance of the nation dominating EV supply chains.
In 2019, the research firm Radarlock issued a report highlighting how BYD is intertwined with the Chinese government and has been used to help China access foreign technologies, data, and markets. The report detailed BYD's extensive cooperation with China's military and noted that its products contain components manufactured by state-owned entities.
"BYD has engaged in a classic case of red, white and blue washing, portraying itself as your friendly neighborhood bus and auto maker, while it is actually more like an extension of the Chinese state," Alliance for American Manufacturing president Scott Paul said after the report's release.
Months later, Congress passed the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, which prohibits federal funding from being used to procure buses manufactured by a company that "is owned or controlled by, is a subsidiary of, or is otherwise related legally or financially to a corporation based in" China. While BYD doesn't sell EVs in the United States, it does sell electric buses, which it manufactures at a facility in Southern California.
Newsom's administration, meanwhile, selected BYD for a lucrative contract in 2020 to provide electric buses as part of the state's effort to decarbonize its public transit sector. Around the same time, per a Free Beacon report, the state awarded BYD a $1 billion no-bid COVID-19 contract to supply California with 200 million masks per month and re-upped the contract with a $315.6 million mask order, a deal that attracted heavy scrutiny after BYD missed early delivery deadlines and failed its initial federal certification vetting, and Newsom declined to provide details of the contract to legislators.
And last year, after Congress shot down California's EV mandate, Newsom lamented that the move would prevent BYD from selling its cars in America merely because the vehicles are "produced overseas."
