Near the end of 2022, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin told the Virginia Economic Development Partnership group to remove the state from the running to host a $3.5 billion battery factory that Ford Motor was considering in partnership with China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), the world’s largest lithium-ion battery manufacturer.During the speech, he called on Virginia’s General Assembly to send him a bill that would “prohibit dangerous foreign entities tied to the Chinese Communist Party from purchasing Virginia’s farmland.” In the Washington Post, Youngkin’s chief legal counsel Richard Cullen was quoted saying, “They (CATL) were looking for land and incentives to build something and I think that was the nucleus of the evolving concern about farmland.”Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis recently made statements that China was attempting to purchase land in his own state, and that they should be wary of those actions.After the speech, many news sources reported that the Virginia governor said, “We felt that the right thing to do was to not recruit Ford as a front for China to America.”A spokesperson for the Governor told the Detroit News, “While Ford is an iconic American company, it became clear that this proposal would serve as a front for the Chinese Communist Party, which could compromise our economic security and Virginians’ personal privacy.”Ford was also considering building the facility in Michigan.Any other transfer to third parties will not take place unless this is justified on the basis of applicable data protection regulations or if pv magazine is legally obliged to do so.Otherwise, your data will be deleted if pv magazine has processed your request or the purpose of data storage is fulfilled."