If you’ve noticed, the United States has been very active in trying to curtail and contain their near-peer adversary: China. That’s why they’re ramping up the output of their naval shipyards, why they’re busy promoting greater cooperation with partners in the area, and why they’re establishing new bases in the Philippines.

That mindset extends to a form of economic and commercial containment too, and we saw that in the first Trump administration. That’s why Huawei isn’t using Google anymore after it was alleged by the US that Huawei devices were gathering data for China.

They’re now continuing that strategy as the US Department of Defense/War has release a list of entities that they are tagging as “Chinese Military Companies Operating in the United States” based on their criteria. Some of the notables in the list are brands that we know like Hikvision (CCTV cameras), TP-Link (Network devices), DJI (Drones, cameras), Tencent (Video games, WeChat), Alibaba (e-commerce), among many others.

But what is curious is that the US also tagged two automobile companies. One is NIO; a very future-forward EV company that hasn’t set up any operations in the Philippines. The other is BYD.

Yes, the US has labeled BYD as a “Chinese Military Company” based on their definition which is basically any company that has ties to certain Chinese government agencies. In the release, the US DOW says that “BYD is a military-civil fusion contributor to the Chinese defense industrial base because it is affiliated with MIIT (Ministry of Industry and Information Technology) and because it resides in or is affiliated with a military-civil fusion enterprise zone”.

Now before you look at your BYD with suspicion, do keep in mind that the world has learned that any official announcement that comes out of the US (either via X, Truth Social, Fox News, or even the official White House account) should really be taken with a grain of salt. Propaganda is everywhere.

If the world was to really look at military links between automaker and militaries, the list will be long. Why? Because all automakers and their parent companies supports, supplies or wants to engage in supplying the military and government of the country they are headquartered in.

Ford, GM, Cadillac, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Kia, Tata, Porsche, Volkswagen so on and so forth, all have or have had military contracts for various items now or at some point in the past. That’s just the norm of business.

Is it surprising about what the US DOD/DOW is saying about these companies? No. If anything, it’s more like amusing.