Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has released a new ad building on his recent rejection of a proposed Ford Motor Co. plant he said would be too closely tied to China.
“Made in Virginia cannot be a front for the Chinese Communist Party,” Youngkin says in the ad, which uses clips from the governor’s State of the Commonwealth speech Jan. 11.
“Virginians, not the CCP, should own the rich and vibrant agricultural lands God has blessed us with,” he says. “That’s why I’m asking this General Assembly to send me a bill to prohibit dangerous foreign entities tied to the CCP from purchasing Virginia’s farmland. Friends, that’s common sense.”
The Daily Caller first reported that Youngkin had removed Virginia as a potential location for a new Ford plant operated in partnership with a Chinese battery company, Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd. A source close to the talks told the outlet the deal’s Chinese connection was a “major concern.”
The news came only four days after the governor banned the popular Chinese-owned social media apps TikTok and WeChat from being used on state government devices and WiFi networks.
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During his State of the Commonwealth speech, Youngkin said the CCP poses an “ever-growing” threat to “our national security, our privacy and our way of life in Virginia,” adding that it’s “a dictatorial party that only has one goal: global dominance at the expense of the United States.”
Talking to reporters about the rejected Ford plant after the speech, Youngkin said, “We felt that the right thing to do was to not recruit Ford as a front for China to America,” the Washington Post reported.
Youngkin’s chief legal counsel, Richard Cullen, said the battery plant involved “national security risk-type technology, and he stopped that,” the Post reported.
“They were looking for land and incentives to build something, and I think that was the nucleus” of the farmland concerns mentioned in the speech, Cullen said.
Youngkin spokesman Rob Damschen told the Post that “Virginians can be confident that companies with known ties to the CCP won’t receive a leg up from the Commonwealth’s economic incentive packages.”
