Boviet Solar, the Chinese-owned solar manufacturer that former North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper courted with a $32.6 million taxpayer-funded incentive package in 2024, is reportedly negotiating a complete exit from its American operations, driven out by President Trump's tariff regime and new restrictions on Chinese firms accessing federal green-energy subsidies.
The Boway Group, Boviet's multibillion-dollar Chinese parent company, filed a disclosure with the Shanghai Stock Exchange stating that Trump's policies would have led to unacceptable losses, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The firm is reportedly in negotiations to sell Boviet to an Indian company for $254 million.
The story is a clean case study in what happens when a Democratic governor rolls out the red carpet for a Chinese-linked company, and a Republican president rolls it back up. Cooper, now the Democratic nominee for North Carolina's open Senate seat, staked his economic credibility on Boviet. The firm's retreat raises a pointed question: Who exactly was that $32.6 million supposed to benefit?
In April 2024, Cooper held a televised press conference to announce the incentive package. He touted 900 new jobs and described Boviet as an "international renewable energy company." The framing was deliberate. Cooper did not mention the firm's Chinese ownership or its parent company's deep ties to Beijing.
Those ties were not obscure. Xie Shicai, chairman of the Boway Group, served in China's 13th National People's Congress, the rubber-stamp legislature of the Chinese Communist Party. Boviet itself had already drawn federal scrutiny. In 2023, the Biden Commerce Department investigated the company for allegedly shipping Chinese-manufactured solar products through Vietnam to dodge U.S. anti-dumping duties.
That investigation did not come out of nowhere. The Free Beacon reported that Boviet had boasted on its own website, as far back as 2017, about "strategically" selecting Vietnam as its home base to evade U.S. import duties. A company that publicly advertised its tariff-avoidance strategy was not a well-kept secret.
The Coalition for a Prosperous America, a domestic manufacturing advocacy group, warned at the time. In 2024, the coalition accused Cooper of forcing North Carolina taxpayers to subsidize China's solar industry through the incentive package. Cooper's office brushed off the criticism. The factory opened in April 2025.
Two things hit Boviet in rapid succession. In April 2025, the Trump administration imposed a 160 percent tariff on Boviet's Vietnamese imports. That alone would have squeezed the company's margins hard. But the real blow came from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which Trump signed into law. The legislation included a provision barring Chinese-owned businesses from accessing Inflation Reduction Act subsidies, the very federal dollars that made projects like Boviet's North Carolina factory financially attractive in the first place.
The combination was decisive. The Boway Group's Shanghai Stock Exchange disclosure made the calculus plain: Trump's policies made the U.S. market untenable. The parent company moved to sell.
The episode fits a broader pattern of Trump framing hardline trade and fiscal policies as wins for American workers, and of those policies producing concrete results that his critics struggle to dismiss.
Nick Iacovella, executive vice president of the Coalition for a Prosperous America, told the Free Beacon that Boviet's reported exit validated every warning his organization had raised two years earlier.
"Governor Cooper wrongly welcomed China's state-subsidized solar industry into North Carolina, and even applauded the use of taxpayer dollars to support it."
Iacovella went further, connecting the Boviet case to the broader architecture of Trump's trade enforcement.
"Now, thanks to the Trump administration's policies and the foreign entity of concern restrictions in the One Big Beautiful Bill, Boviet Solar is being forced to unwind its Chinese ownership and exit. That outcome validates exactly what we warned about: These investments were never about creating American jobs, they were a backdoor for CCP-controlled firms to access U.S. taxpayer dollars and penetrate the domestic market."
He called on Cooper to own the mistake publicly.
"Governor Cooper should acknowledge that mistake and be just as enthusiastic about seeing Chinese ownership shown the door."
Cooper's campaign offered no such acknowledgment. A spokesman told the Free Beacon that Cooper "successfully recruited major companies to our state to create thousands of jobs, lower energy bills, and put money in the pockets of working families while making North Carolina the best state for business three out of the last four years." The statement did not address the Chinese ownership question, the Boway Group's CCP ties, or the federal investigation that predated the incentive deal.
Stack the dates and the defense falls apart. In 2017, Boviet advertised its Vietnam base as a tariff-evasion strategy. In 2023, the Biden administration's own Commerce Department investigated the company for exactly that scheme. In April 2024, after the federal investigation, Cooper stood in front of cameras and handed the firm $32.6 million in state and local incentives, calling Boviet an "international renewable energy company" without disclosing its Chinese parent's political connections.
That sequence is not a story about bad luck or unforeseeable market shifts. It is a story about a governor who either did not do his homework or did not care what the homework said.
Cooper is now running for the U.S. Senate. Voters in North Carolina may want to ask whether the same judgment that welcomed a CCP-linked solar firm with taxpayer money is the judgment they want representing them in Washington. The administration has been willing to take aggressive action on issues where prior leadership hesitated, and the Boviet case shows what that looks like in practice.
Several questions hang over the story. The name of the Indian company reportedly negotiating to buy Boviet has not been disclosed. The exact date of the Boway Group's Shanghai Stock Exchange filing is unclear, as is its precise language beyond the reported summary. And the specific location of Boviet's North Carolina factory, the one built with $32.6 million in public incentives, has not been identified in reporting so far.
Perhaps the sharpest open question is what happens to the incentive money. If Boviet exits the United States entirely and the promised 900 jobs evaporate, North Carolina taxpayers deserve a full accounting of where their $32.6 million went, and whether any clawback provisions exist. Cooper's campaign statement said nothing about that.
The broader fight over Chinese firms exploiting American green-energy subsidies is not limited to one factory in one state. Democrats have pushed back hard against Trump's fiscal priorities, but the Boviet case makes their position awkward: the Inflation Reduction Act subsidies they championed were, in at least this instance, flowing toward a company with direct ties to the Chinese Communist Party.
The One Big Beautiful Bill's foreign-entity-of-concern restrictions were designed to close exactly this kind of loophole. Whether the provision survives legal challenges and applies broadly enough to prevent similar arrangements remains to be seen. But the early returns, a CCP-linked firm heading for the exits, suggest the policy is working as intended.
Trump's tariff decisions have generated fierce debate, including institutional pushback from unexpected quarters. But the Boviet episode is a difficult one for critics to spin. A Chinese-owned company, led by a chairman who sat in Beijing's legislature, used a Vietnam shell game to dodge American trade rules, collected millions in North Carolina tax incentives, and only left when a president finally enforced the kind of restrictions that should have been in place all along.
Roy Cooper bet North Carolina's money on a company that was already under federal investigation for trade fraud. Trump called the bet. Cooper lost.
When a governor spends $32.6 million of other people's money to welcome a CCP-connected firm, and the firm bolts the moment someone enforces the rules, that is not a trade-policy failure. That is an accountability test, and Cooper has yet to take it.
