The Pentagon on Monday formally classified BYD, the world's largest electric vehicle maker, as a Chinese military company. Days later, California campaign finance records show that BYD executive Li Ke, also known as Stella Li, gave Governor Gavin Newsom $50,000 across two election cycles, more than she has spent supporting all other California candidates combined, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Li, a Chinese national who serves as executive vice president of the Shenzhen-based BYD Company and president of BYD Americas, donated $20,000 to Newsom's 2018 gubernatorial campaign and another $30,000 to his 2022 reelection effort. The figures come from California campaign finance disclosures reviewed by the Free Beacon. Li is reportedly married to BYD's billionaire founder and CEO, Wang Chuanfu, a member of the Chinese Communist Party and an ally of Chinese president Xi Jinping.
The timing is the problem. Newsom didn't just take the money. He awarded BYD lucrative state contracts, visited the company's headquarters in China, and publicly championed its products, all while red flags about BYD's ties to Beijing's military apparatus piled up in government reports, congressional legislation, and now a formal Pentagon blacklist.
Newsom's relationship with BYD runs far deeper than campaign checks. In 2020, his administration selected BYD for a contract to supply electric buses as part of California's push to decarbonize public transit. Around the same time, California handed BYD a $1 billion no-bid COVID-19 contract to supply 200 million masks per month, then re-upped the deal with a $315.6 million mask order. Newsom declined to provide legislators with details of the mask contract.
That wall of silence fits a broader pattern of opacity around Newsom's spending decisions.
Then came the 2023 trip to Shenzhen, where Newsom visited BYD's headquarters and test-drove a BYD model that floats. "Who needs a car when you can have a car and a boat?" the governor said. The Free Beacon reported last year that a left-wing foundation with a history of supporting Chinese climate initiatives sponsored the China trip.
When Congress shot down California's EV mandate last year, Newsom lamented that the move would prevent BYD from selling its cars in America merely because the vehicles are "produced overseas", a framing that glossed over the national security dimension entirely.
The Pentagon's Section 1260H list identifies Chinese companies operating in the United States that contribute to Beijing's strategy of leveraging private-sector technology to boost its military might. Defense officials first assembled the list in 2021 and have regularly updated it. BYD's addition on Monday places the company in the same category as firms the federal government considers extensions of China's defense and intelligence apparatus.
The classification did not come out of nowhere. A 2019 report by Radarlock detailed how BYD is intertwined with the Chinese government and has been used to help China access foreign technologies, data, and markets. The report also described BYD's extensive cooperation with China's military and noted that its products contain components manufactured by state-owned entities.
Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing, put it bluntly after that report's release:
"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."
Months after the Radarlock report, 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. BYD manufactures electric buses at a facility in Southern California, but its parent company sits in Shenzhen.
BYD's dominance of global EV markets is itself an outgrowth of CCP industrial policy. The U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission has documented how Beijing's "Made in China 2025" plans emphasized Chinese dominance of EV supply chains. The Chinese government heavily subsidized BYD with billions of dollars in incentives over more than a decade, and China's military provided significant research support to the company.
Joseph Cella, a former U.S. ambassador who founded the Secure Our States Coalition to combat Chinese influence in America, told the Free Beacon:
"China's always looking for a weak link and I think that they found a weak link in Governor Newsom."
Cella went further, describing Newsom's posture toward Beijing as something beyond mere naivety:
"Governor Newsom has a naive view of the CCP, he almost has an affinity or grossly imprudent tolerance of their ways."
He also framed the Pentagon's decision in the starkest terms: "The Department of War has blacklisted BYD for a reason. It means that there is a threat to the national security of the United States."
Federal law does allow foreign nationals who have obtained a green card to donate to any federal, state, or local campaign. Li Ke's immigration status is not specified in the available records. But the legal question of whether the donations were permissible is separate from the political and national security question of whether a sitting governor should be taking tens of thousands of dollars from an executive of a company the Pentagon now classifies as a Chinese military firm.
Neither Newsom's office nor BYD responded to the Free Beacon's requests for comment.
The BYD entanglement is not an isolated data point in Newsom's record. His former chief of staff pleaded guilty in a federal campaign fraud scheme, and his administration has faced persistent scrutiny over how it steers taxpayer dollars.
State records show California directed $1 billion in taxpayer funds to migrant nonprofits under Newsom's watch, and critics have questioned whether the governor's frequent absences from the state, travel records show 229 days outside California since 2023, have left oversight gaps that make arrangements like the BYD relationship easier to maintain without accountability.
The timeline tells its own story. Warnings about BYD's military ties surfaced publicly in 2019. Congress acted in 2020. The Pentagon began assembling its Chinese military company list in 2021. Through all of it, Newsom kept taking BYD's executive's money, awarding BYD contracts, visiting BYD's headquarters, and promoting BYD's products. Now the Pentagon has made the national security risk official.
Several questions remain unanswered. What active contracts does California currently hold with BYD? What were the details of the COVID-19 mask deal that Newsom refused to share with legislators? And what, exactly, did the left-wing foundation that sponsored Newsom's China trip expect in return?
The Pentagon's Monday classification does not, by itself, void existing state contracts or trigger legal consequences for past donations. But it strips away any remaining pretense that BYD is just another automaker. The federal government has now formally stated that BYD operates as part of China's military-industrial complex.
Governors who take $50,000 from executives of companies the Pentagon classifies as Chinese military firms don't get to claim they weren't warned. The warnings were everywhere. Newsom chose the money anyway.
