Gavin Bade

But...

Who knows where they're at now?

So vitro, when they start to see that this investigation is maybe stalled or it's not coming to a conclusion very quickly, they get involved in Washington and they start, you know, pressing on the members of Congress who have vitro plants, right?

So they're pushing hard on members of Congress and the Trump administration and, you know, trying to get their story in the press so that they can get more attention to this.

The Vitro people are pulling their hair out.

They feel like they're getting cheated out of the market here.

They're really trying to adapt to this new competitive environment, but they feel like Fuyao is not playing the same game that they are.

— What's happening with Fuyao, China hawks say, is internal dumping.

A company not shipping product from another country, but locating here in the United States, and then pricing their products so low that they push out all the competition.

So rather than importing lowly-priced goods, they are creating them here and pushing out existing competition.

What Vitro and what other China hawks in Washington will say is there's a broader issue with Chinese companies investing in critical sectors in the United States, even if they aren't doing human trafficking, right?

The automotive sector has been identified as a sector that is critical to national security, not just by the Trump administration, but governments' administrations before, right?

Now you have a Chinese company that...

However they're doing it, they're getting a dominant position in a critical part of this very important industry.

And the worry is, is that if there is a conflagration between the U.S.

and China, Beijing can just tell Fuyao, stop supplying these American companies and really can mess up the automotive supply chain.

It's happening in fits and starts, but there are Chinese companies looking in particular sectors to expand their footprint, right?

One of them is in the copper sector right now.

That is a copper industry also identified as a national security imperative by the Trump administration, right?

And the thing is, is that, oh, if Trump wants to tout this big deal with Xi Jinping, well, maybe this happens a lot faster in the years to come.