A lawsuit to stop Chinese lithium ion battery maker Gotion from building a plant in Manteno, Illinois, awaits a decision next month, as Americans push back against government officials wooing Chinese companies. America’s governors and state governments are playing a reckless game with our tax dollars: competing to host U.S. locations of China-owned companies. In retrospect, allowing China-owned companies to establish operations in the U.S. is only the latest commercial iteration of Making America China.
First, George H.W. Bush laid the diplomatic groundwork for outsourcing to China, letting the lights go out in our Pax Americana-era factories. Then around the 2010s, China started buying our mega brands such as Smithfield Foods and Starwood Hotels. More recently, Chinese companies have graciously offered to dust off our shuttered factories for their own profit, “as our way of cherishing and conserving resources,” said Gotion Chairman Li Zhen in 2023 of its bargain-basement factory acquisition in Manteno.
Rather than being insulted, state and local officials find this offer so appealing that they throw tax-funded incentives at the Chinese companies in competition with each other. Thus completes the generational cycle of American businesses, to no businesses, to Chinese businesses occupying the industrial properties of what has become the Rust Belt.
They Were Warned
The current mood, in which the various states perceive themselves to be in a hot bidding war for each Chinese company that speculates about U.S. expansion, can be traced back to a meeting in May 2019. It was an Exclusive Deal Making
