The US suspects BYD and other firms are aiding the Chinese military
We know that the United States-China relations aren’t exactly at their best right now, and it has been like that for a long while now. Companies such as Huawei have been hit with economic sanctions since 2019, blocking their access to US-originated technologies and such.
And now, according to Reuters, several new Chinese firms have been added to a list of companies that it believes that aids the Chinese military, and that includes automaker BYD.
Specifically, the Pentagon (or the United States’ Department of Defense or War) has marked a handful of companies, such as e-commerce giant Alibaba, search provider Baidu, and automakers BYD and Nio, among a few others, that are suspected of aiding the military — and this comes especially after US President Donald Trump’s meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping last month.
For BYD, the publicly accessible list states that “the automaker is both directly and indirectly affiliated with the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission (SASAC) and indirectly affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), and that BYD is a military-civil fusion contributor to a Chinese defense industrial base due to its affiliation with the MIIT, and it resides in/or is affiliated with a military-civil fusion enterprise zone.”
This accusation not only implies potentially further heightened political tensions between the two countries, but it also means that potential sanctions for the companies could happen. At the moment, there are no sanctions written on paper, but this will most likely make it harder for the company to develop its products by limiting access to which companies it is allowed to work with, like in Huawei’s case, and for its global expansion as well.
These listed firms, however, can petition for their removal from this list, and naturally, the companies have opposed the accusatory statements. Several entities have been taken off the list previously, so we hope that these will all be settled soon, because the last thing we need is yet another conflict.
Photo by Sam Surla
