Newsom Took $50,000 From BYD’s Top U.S. Executive. The Pentagon Just Branded BYD a Chinese Military Company.

On June 8, 2026, the Pentagon added BYD — the world’s largest electric-vehicle maker — to its Section 1260H list of “Chinese military companies operating in the United States,” alongside Alibaba, Baidu, and Nio. Federal contracting consequences follow automatically: a direct Defense Department procurement ban starting June 30, and a third-party ban in 2027.

One day later, the Washington Free Beacon surfaced the California angle: Li Ke — known in the U.S. as Stella Li — BYD’s executive vice president and the head of its Americas operation, gave Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) $50,000 across his gubernatorial campaigns: $20,000 in the 2018 cycle and $30,000 for his 2022 re-election, per campaign-finance records reported by the Beacon.

The donations were legal — Li is a Chinese national with a U.S. green card, which permits political giving. The story is not illegality. It is judgment: the same governor who took the checks handed BYD a $990,000,000no-bid pandemic mask contract, toured its Shenzhen headquarters gushing “I want two” over its flagship SUV — and now leads a state whose favorite EV partner the Pentagon — which now styles itself the Department of War — formally classifies as an arm of China’s military-industrial complex. Newsom’s office declined to comment. There is no indication the money is being returned.

• $50,000 — from BYD executive Li "Stella" Ke to Newsom's 2018 and 2022 campaigns, per records reported by the Free Beacon · Source: Washington Free Beacon, Cal-Access
• $990,000,000 — California's April 2020 no-bid mask contract to BYD — $3.30 per N95 while Los Angeles paid a competitor 79 cents · Source: CalMatters, California Globe
• 188 entities — on the Pentagon's updated Section 1260H Chinese-military-company list, with BYD among 16 additions · Source: Federal Register, June 10, 2026
• ~$330M — in grants, subsidies, and contracts to BYD from Southern California agencies before LA Metro pulled its underperforming buses · Source: Washington Free Beacon, Oct 2023

The Section 1260H list, mandated by the FY2021 defense bill, is the Pentagon’s formal register of companies it determines are “Chinese military companies” — firms tied into Beijing’s military-civil fusion strategy. The June 8 update grew the list to 188 entities, adding 16 including BYD, Alibaba, Baidu, robot-maker Unitree, and EV rival Nio. The department cited BYD’s affiliation with China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology as the basis. Rep. John Moolenaar (R-MI), chairman of the House Select Committee on the CCP, called the update “a warning to American businesses, all levels of government, and the American people.”

BYD says the designation “seriously contradicts the facts” and has pledged “all feasible administrative and legal means” to contest it — the company’s U.S. units were already suing over 100% tariffs. The listing carries no automatic sanctions, but its signal is exactly what Moolenaar says it is: a federal determination that doing business with BYD means doing business adjacent to the People’s Liberation Army. Which is what makes the next section a California problem.

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Li Ke is not a peripheral figure. She is BYD’s executive vice president, president of BYD Americas, the public face of the company’s U.S. expansion — and, the Free Beacon reports, married to BYD’s billionaire founder and chairman Wang Chuanfu (a detail the Beacon attributes to reports, and so do we). Her giving to Newsom tracked BYD’s California business: contributions beginning in March 2018 as Newsom first ran for governor, more in November 2019, totaling $50,000 across the 2018 and 2022 cycles. A 2021 CapRadio investigation had already flagged her among the major Newsom donors whose companies received no-bid contracts during the COVID response.

Joseph Cella, the former U.S. ambassador to Fiji who now runs the Secure Our States Coalition, supplied the story’s frame — and it is a critic’s assessment, not a Pentagon finding: “China’s always looking for a weak link and I think that they found a weak link in Governor Newsom.” Newsom, he added, “has a naive view of the CCP — he almost has an affinity or grossly imprudent tolerance of their ways.”

“China's always looking for a weak link and I think that they found a weak link in Governor Newsom.”

Joseph Cella · former U.S. ambassador · to the Washington Free Beacon, June 9, 2026

The relationship’s defining transaction came in April 2020, when Newsom announced — on MSNBC, before most of his own legislature had seen the contract — that California would pay BYD roughly $990,000,000 for 200 million masks a month. It was a no-bid deal with a Chinese automaker that had never been a mask company. The state paid $3.30 per N95; Los Angeles was buying from an established competitor at $0.79. BYD missed delivery deadlines and initially failed federal NIOSH certification, forcing California to claw back and re-negotiate — then Sacramento re-upped anyway, with a $315,600,000 extension that July.

BYD’s other California ledger entries read similarly: roughly $330,000,000in grants, subsidies, and contracts from Southern California agencies for its Lancaster bus factory’s products — and LA Metro decommissioning its first five BYD electric buses for poor performance before switching suppliers. The pattern the Free Beacon documents is not one bad deal; it is a state government that kept paying a politically connected vendor through documented failure.

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In October 2023, Newsom took a week-long trip to China — paid for in part by a left-leaning foundation that also funds CCP-affiliated green groups, per the Free Beacon’s earlier reporting — and made BYD’s Shenzhen headquarters a marquee stop. He test-drove the Yangwang U8, BYD’s $160,000 luxury SUV, and told his hosts: “I want two… We got to get these in the States.” The next day he met Xi Jinpingat the Great Hall of the People. Fox Business and Republican critics torched the spectacle at the time; the Pentagon’s classification now reads as the federal government’s formal answer to it.

The bipartisan context matters and we note it: alarm about BYD is not a partisan eccentricity. Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI)has called Chinese vehicles a “cancer” to the global auto industry. The distinction the record draws is narrower — among major American politicians, the governor of California was the one personally banking the company’s checks, promoting its products in Shenzhen, and signing its no-bid contracts.

The 1260H designation is not symbolic. Direct Defense Department contracting with listed companies is barred starting June 30, 2026; procurement through third parties follows in June 2027. Public companies on the list face delisting pressure — Moolenaar’s committee is demanding it outright — and state and local governments that contracted with BYD, none more enthusiastically than California, now own the question of whether to keep doing so. BYD’s Lancaster plant, billed as North America’s largest electric-bus factory, sits in the middle of that question with hundreds of California jobs attached.

As of publication: no ethics complaint has been filed, no investigation of the donations has been reported, and none is implied — the contributions were lawful. Newsom’s office declined the Free Beacon’s request for comment; BYD declined to address the donations; and the listing itself is headed for the administrative fight BYD has promised. The timing footnote: the Pentagon dropped the list roughly a month after Trump’s Beijing summit with Xi and the trade truce — proof the designation was a security determination Beijing’s diplomats could not negotiate away.

Every fact in this story was public before June 8 except one — and that one reframes all the others. The checks were disclosed. The mask deal was covered. The Shenzhen test drive was televised. What changed is that the United States government now formally classifies the company behind all of it as a Chinese military company. A governor — and likely 2028 presidential aspirant — whose record includes $50,000from that company’s top American executive and more than a billion dollars in state business steered its way no longer gets to call the relationship routine.

The questions that follow are concrete, and Sacramento will have to answer them: Does California keep contracting with a 1260H-listed company? Does Newsom return Li’s contributions, as officeholders routinely do when a donor’s affiliations turn radioactive? His office’s first answer — silence — is on the record. We will update this page when there is a second one.

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