Gotion: Illinois Residents Rally to Stop China’s Goliath

By Gordon G. Chang

 “No go on Gotion.”

That’s the rallying cry of Manteno residents campaigning to close a battery plant in that Illinois village, an hour south of Chicago. The same Chinese company, late last year, was forced to abandon a similar project in Michigan.

Gotion had planned to develop a $2.4 billion flagship factory to make battery parts in Green Charter Township, near Big Rapids. The Michigan Economic Development Corp. believes the Chinese company has now abandoned the project and is therefore seeking to claw back subsidies.

“Gotion now admits the project is dead,” Robby Dube, the Eckland & Blando attorney for both the Green Charter and Manteno residents, told me last month. “I am incredibly proud of the brave citizens who stood up to fight for their community against immense pressure from the State of Michigan, which funneled millions of dollars to Gotion to purchase American farmland, and from Gotion itself. They never faltered and never wavered.”

Green Charter residents mobilized, filing lawsuits, petitioning officials, and demonstrating in the streets. Finally, an exhausted company and weary state government threw in the towel.

The people in Manteno have now become activists in the same mold as those from Michigan. 

In September 2023, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker announced that Gotion would build a $2 billion plant in his state to manufacture lithium batteries for EVs. The state then awarded the company half a billion dollars in total incentives, including tax benefits. Pritzker said the facility would create 2,600 jobs.

Gotion had originally planned to split operations between the two states by manufacturing battery cells in Michigan and shipping them to Illinois for assembly into battery packs. Now, after defeat in Michigan, the company has looked to both manufacture and assemble in Manteno. Its plant has now begun operations there.

Local Manteo residents are worried. “The Chinese-controlled Gotion plant is a threat to our community,” Amanda Piker, a resident and founding member of Concerned Citizens of Manteno, told me in 2024. “If the plan is fully developed, it will add thousands more people to our town of 9,000 and create stress on our schools, housing, and infrastructure. The deal was made behind closed doors with no community input.”

The opposition to the Chinese company in Illinois has been fierce. About 50 townspeople first gathered in a parking lot, one evening in September 2023, where they decided to organize and fight the Chinese company. They formed the Concerned Citizens of Manteno, which filed a lawsuit against the Village of Manteno and Gotion in the Circuit Court of Kankakee County.

The amended complaint states the plaintiffs oppose the plant for “environmental, national security, health, safety, and good governance reasons.” Among other claims, the residents in their lawsuit argue that Manteno officials did not adhere to local rules when they greenlighted the Gotion plant, especially prohibitions against “highly toxic chemicals.” Gotion is contesting the allegations.

“Only someone who hates America and taxpayers would give Chinese Communist Party-backed Gotion a red cent, let alone a $536 million tax subsidy from Illinois and potentially $7 billion more from federal taxpayers,” said Jeanne Ives, a former Illinois state representative and leading critic of the Manteno facility, in emailed comments in 2024.

As the website of Manteno’s Freedom Party states of the Gotion plant, the community “does not want it or need it, cannot afford it, and has laws which do not allow it.” The party last April elected two to the six-member village Board of Trustees and prevailed in the mayoralty race.

Four other trustees support Gotion, but new Mayor Annette Lamore tells me some of them are changing their minds because the company is not keeping promises to the village, especially promises regarding the operation of a fire brigade

“Gotion has brought people together and made them realize how important it is to pay attention to what is happening,” says Lamore.

“The No-Gotion fight is truly a David versus Goliath one,” Ives told me in March. “The Concerned Citizens of Manteno are fighting big government and big corporate, and their lawyers are backed by unlimited taxpayer funds and money coming from the Chinese. The Concerned Citizens are heroes.”

In Michigan, organized residents took on their governor and the world’s largest totalitarian state and still won. Said Dube, “The fight goes on in Illinois, but it’s a fight we’ve demonstrated can be won.”

Gordon G. Chang is the author of Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America and The Coming Collapse of China. Follow him on X @GordonGChang.