The Ohio glass maker boosted by Barack Obama and recently raided by ICE for employing illegal workers also has deep ties to the Chinese government, according to the history of the company’s owners.
Fuyao Glass in Montgomery County, Ohio, was raided by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last July as part of an investigation into hundreds of workers who were illegally smuggled into the U.S. and reportedly kept in near slave conditions to work for a string of manufacturers, one of which was Fuyao.
The glass maker was one of the companies under investigation for a human smuggling ring, an investigation that also tracked money laundering, the federal government said at the time.
Special agents from Homeland Security and the IRS Criminal Investigation unit were investigating allegations of financial crimes and labor exploitation. The investigation led them to Fuyao, as well as other businesses in the area in Ohio.
The Fuyao glass factory goes back to 2014, when its Chinese owners moved in to purchase a General Motors glass factory after the carmaker closed the operation down. The owners signed a $200 million agreement to operate the factory in Moraine, near Dayton.
Not long after opening the plant became the subject of a documentary by Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company. The documentary was immediately nominated for Best Documentary Oscars Award in 2019, and, probably unsurprisingly, won the award at the Oscars broadcast in 2020.
Then came the ICE raid, after which the company insisted it was a victim of a staffing company accused of employing illegal Chinese migrants. And yet, there was also some suspicion Fuyao was somehow tipped off that the federal raid was in the offing.
According to the Springfield News-Sun, a large number of the illegal aliens who were working at the glass plant had mysteriously stopped coming to work ten days before the raid in July of 2024. Then, about 100 new workers, all with Chinese names, began arriving in unmarked, windowless vans, just after the federal investigators left the work site.
But along with the company’s problems during the investigations into money laundering and human trafficking, the Chinese-owned company has other deep-seated issues that are not as well publicized.
For instance, in an interview in 2023, Cao Dewang, Fuyao’s chairman, expressed his fealty to the Chinese Communist Party.
In the interview, Dewang was talking about a university he was founding named the Fuyao University of Science and Technology (FYUST), which opened in Fuzhou, China. And he said, “The government respects me very much. They let me be chairman for 10 years. I will use the 10 years to build a sustainable management system. The school is owned by the government, but I oversee it. Under charity law, as a donor, I have direct oversight. Our principle is to unconditionally adhere to the leadership of the Communist Party and the Chinese government and implement the principal responsibility system under the leadership of the board.”
According to Made In China Journal, the company Dewang runs is also heavily embedded with Chinese Communist Party members. The journal reports that “over 70 percent of Party members occupy key positions in the management or technical leadership, including 22 senior executives.”
So, the company celebrated by the Obamas seems to have employed illegal aliens and is deeply tied to the Communist Chinese Party.
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