(Photo by Joe Kovacs)

Ford Motor Company reportedly has a Chinese company in charge of hiring workers at its new battery plant in Michigan, contradicting the auto giant’s claims it will be an American-owned and operated project, while raising national security concerns.

Just the News reports: “The plant has generated significant controversy because of Ford’s partnership with China-based Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited, known as CATL, which closely collaborates with the Chinese military and government. The U.S. Defense Department earlier this year marked CATL as a Chinese Military Company to warn American firms about the risks of doing business.”

Republicans in Michigan’s legislature have been critical of the Ford plant, saying the state government failed to adequately vet the project and Ford’s partners in the project.

“From the outset of the corrupted ‘deal’ concocted and championed between Governor Whitmer, Ford, the Michigan Economic Development Corporation (MEDC) and China-based and Chinese Communist Party-tied (CCP) Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited (CATL) has been fast moving and in secret,” Joseph Cella, former U.S. ambassador to Fiji and Director of the Michigan-China Economic Security Review Group told Just the News.

“In their haste, unconscionably, parties to this ‘deal’ performed no strict scrutiny or due diligence, defying the directives given by our national security and intelligence agencies to state and local governments and American corporations when dealing with China-based companies, jeopardizing our national security and taxpayer dollars.”

In spite of controversies of Chinese-licensed tech and Republican efforts in Congress to strip tax subsidies from Joe Biden’s green-projects agenda, Ford is driving ahead with the Michigan project called BlueOval Battery Park Michigan.

Ford defends its strategy to license technology from CATL, claiming it’s an important step in re-shoring U.S. manufacturing. The actual battery being licensed by Ford, known as a lithium-iron-phosphate battery, was invented in America in the 1990s, but the company says at present, there’s no way to produce them in the U.S. without Chinese know-how.

“How can we compete if we don’t have this technology? Somebody has to take the lead to do this,” Ford’s vice president of technology platform programs and electric vehicles Lisa Drake told Axios. “I’m convinced this is the right thing to do for the United States.”

On its website, Ford calls it an “historic first step” to increasing American competitiveness of in the worldwide EV market.

“An American automotive company is manufacturing – without relying on a foreign joint venture – LFP battery cells and battery packs domestically with American workers for American-assembled next-generation electric vehicles,” the company states.

It also says the location will be “wholly owned and operated by Ford.”

Despite that claim, job listings on job platforms such as LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter raise questions about whether the battery park is really independent from its Chinese partner.

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