Yard signs along the quiet country roads of Green Charter Township, Mich., home to horse farms and a 19th-century fish hatchery, blare a message that an angered community hopes is heard by local leaders, the Biden administration and China: “No Gotion.”
The opposition is to a plan by Gotion, a subsidiary of a Chinese company, to build a $2.4 billion electric vehicle battery factory on roughly 270 acres of largely uninhabited scrubland. An investment of that magnitude can transform a local economy, but in this case it is unwelcome by many. Residents fear that the company’s presence is a dangerous infiltration by the Chinese Communist Party, and it has led to backlash, death threats and an attempt to unseat the elected officials who backed the project.
The debate over the factory has turned a township of about 3,000 people, 60 miles north of Grand Rapids, against each other and into an unlikely battleground in the economic contest between the United States and China. The resistance is part of a broader movement by states to erect new barriers to Chinese investment amid concerns about national security and growing anti-China sentiment.
“It’s the Communist influences that I’m bothered by, because they have shown repeatedly that they don’t care about our rules, our laws or anything,” said Lori Brock, who lives on a 150-acre horse farm near where the battery factory is being built. “They shouldn’t be able to buy here.”
That sentiment has been reverberating in…
