BeijingWest Industries (BWI) Indiana, a China-owned company, is closing its Greenfield business after operating there since only 2019. What do the Hancock County Council, Hancock Economic Development Corporation, and Greenfield Mayor Guy Titus think about this?
As a member of the Fortville Town Council, I am concerned about China-owned businesses entering Indiana. However much the new jobs may benefit a downtrodden area or improve the economic lives of its residents, the profits benefit the Chinese company – and therefore the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) – immeasurably more.
The Indiana General Assembly passed HB1183, restricting land sales to China and other adversarial countries in the case of farmland or any land within 10 miles of a military base; it went into effect 1 July. For an illustration of why many states are limiting China-owned businesses, check out the CCP’s short and sweet National Intelligence Law of 2017. This directs that “any organization or citizen shall support, assist, and cooperate with the state intelligence work” and “state intelligence work institutions shall collect and handle the acts or acts of foreign institutions, organizations, and individuals….”
In other words, China-owned companies operating in the United States are expected to collect intelligence on the United States. Further, most large Chinese companies, especially those allowed to expand into the United States, have CCP members or even party committees within them ensuring loyalty to the CCP’s goals. Any Chinese companies that turn up in our country, BWI included, were selected for loyalty to the CCP and its goals. We should be very concerned about this.
I bring this information to your attention and ask that we consider more carefully which businesses we allow to set up in this county and state. I believe no China-owned, CCP-accountable businesses should expand into this country at all.
I realize that it is difficult for the counties to know what kind of businesses they are accepting due to the Indiana Economic Development Corporation’s (IEDC) practice of completing anonymized deals. But in this particular case, BWI received a resounding welcome that eliminates plausible deniability about what the IEDC was doing.
Governor Holcomb said in 2019 that he’d been working on this deal since 2017. Then-Mayor of Greenfield Chuck Newell noted in the same article that he was “proud” of this arrangement, which he’d have been read into previously.
The America China Society of Indiana, which promotes bi-lateral trade between Indiana and China – a paid contractor of the IEDC – gave BWI a “Friend of Indiana” award at its year-end gala in 2018. For those keeping score, this was before BWI had even commenced operations. Both the Hancock Economic Development Corporation (HEDC) and BWI went on to become recurring sponsors of the America China Society of Indiana after BWI opened – why? And why do we even need a non-profit to promote China-owned businesses to come here?
I hope these details paint a picture of what else is going on behind the scenes and inspire curiosity and some vigilance among us. As BWI departs, we should encourage our local, county and state government officials to turn away from China-owned companies and focus on helping new American companies form and prosper. Surely someone in Indiana would like to make high-end brake shoes and shock absorbers?
Vanessa Battaglia
Fortville
