Hailiang presents itself as a private company, and technically it is. But in China, “private” does not mean independent. Publicly available Hailiang materials describe CCP-building activities within the company, CCP-related honors, and the founder’s stated personal commitment to “listen to the Party, follow the Party.” Feng Hailiang has made his political alignment explicit.
Hailiang is a national-scale copper processor operating within a political system that expects it to support CCP industrial policy. The Hailiang Copper Texas case raises practical questions about how capacity embedded in the U.S. market may be misdirected or misused under conditions of geopolitical or supply-chain stress. The U.S. should not assume that domestic production automatically equates to domestic availability. If Texas officials need a preview of how this plays out, they should look at what just happened in North Carolina — and how it connects back to copper.
The Boway Group is one of China’s largest, privately held, copper and copper-alloy producers. Despite being private, Boway’s board of directors is stacked with CCP members, including its chairman, who served in the Chinese National People’s Congress. Boway received tens of millions of dollars in Chinese state subsidies in 2024 alone. In 2024, Boway used its solar energy subsidiary, Boviet Solar, to win a $32.6 million state and local incentive package from then-Governor Roy Cooper to build a solar panel factory in Greenville, North Carolina. Cooper referred to Boviet as an “international renewable energy company” at the announcement ceremony, glossing over its parent company’s identity as a CCP-linked copper conglomerate.
Because Boviet was a new construction rather than an acquisition, it fell outside CFIUS jurisdiction entirely. This is one of China’s most effective tools for embedding itself in American supply chains without oversight — and the Boway case illustrates why. A Chinese copper company used a solar subsidiary to get a foothold in the United States, access taxpayer incentives, and gain proximity to American supply chains without a single national security review.
The structural problem underlying both cases is a gap in American foreign investment oversight. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was designed to screen adversarial takeovers of U.S. businesses, but it rarely covers greenfield investments. Because Hailiang in Texas was new construction, it fell largely outside CFIUS jurisdiction. The same was true of Wellascent Technology’s (aka Jiateng Electric) $100 million copper wire factory in Grand Prairie,Texas, China’s copper tubing giant Golden Dragon’s plant in Pine Hill, Alabama, and Boway’s North Carolina facility. China copper is everywhere in the United States.
Ideally, U.S. policy should categorically prohibit investment, acquisition, or control of U.S. copper assets by entities owned or controlled by the PRC.
U.S. trade policy is built around country of origin — where a product is manufactured. In a vertically integrated, globally networked supply chain, that framework is incomplete. A foreign-controlled entity can manufacture inside the U.S., qualify as domestic, and still rely on opaque upstream sourcing, operate under foreign strategic direction, and distribute its output into global channels aligned with Beijing’s interests. Policymakers should evaluate a “destination-aware” or “deemed export” framework for critical materials like copper — one that considers not only where a product is made, but where it is likely to be directed and how it may ultimately be used.
Texas is Rolling Out the Welcome Mat for China’s Copper Takeover
By EJ Valentine and Kenneth Rapoza
China is quietly making a move on one of America’s most critical industrial materials — copper. Texas is helping them do it.
China-owned Hailiang Group has been steadily building a major copper tube and bar manufacturing facility in Sealy, Texas, 50 miles west of Houston. The $150 million plant, registered in 2018 under the name Hailiang Copper Texas Inc., is now expanding aggressively, with Phase 2 construction on several additional copper bar production lines underway through the summer of 2026. When complete, the 44,000-square-meter industrial complex will have a designed production capacity of 100,000 tons per year.
Texas officials have said nothing. There has been no serious review of what this plant represents, no scrutiny of Hailiang’s ties to the Chinese state, and no reckoning with the fact that a CCP-aligned company is now producing copper on Texas soil, including sourcing inputs from a Xinjiang entity on the federal forced labor blacklist, and supplying copper to a subsidiary of a company sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury for involvement in nuclear weapons production.
That needs to change at the state level, at the federal level, and it needs to change right now.
Hailiang is surely not a household name in the United States. But it is in China. Hailiang is one of the major privately owned industrial groups there, and arguably one of the most important copper-processing companies in the world. It is owned by billionaire Feng Hailiang, who started the company in 1989 as a small copper tube and copper-processing operation before becoming a fully integrated copper giant.
Like many large Chinese private companies, Hailiang plays in economic sectors deemed strategically important to Beijing planners. The company maintains close relationships with Chinese state banks, provincial governments, and industrial policy programs that give it economic advantages American-based rivals do not have. Although private, Hailiang is part of the broader Chinese industrial system and strategy unlike any mid-sized U.S. copper company might be.
The company, therefore, sits at the intersection of critical minerals, copper processing, electrical grid infrastructure, AI data center build out and EVs. If one were to map out global copper supply chains, Hailiang is one of the Chinese companies whose footprints would be all over it.
Copper As National Security Issue
Before explaining what China is doing, it’s worth being clear about what’s at stake. Copper is not a commodity in the ordinary sense. It is the second most consumed material, by weight, in U.S. defense systems. It is irreplaceable in weapons systems, naval vessels, missile guidance units, submarine propulsion, aerospace structures, satellite systems, and the advanced communications infrastructure that modern warfare depends on. Cartridge brass cases ammunition. Phosphor bronze builds naval vessels. Beryllium copper goes into anti-missile defense systems, smart bombs, and space-based communications satellites. There is no substitute.
Beyond defense, copper underpins the entire energy economy. U.S. copper demand is projected to more than double by 2035, driven by electric vehicles, grid upgrades, renewable energy deployment, and data center expansion. The U.S. Geological Survey recognized this reality in its 2025 Critical Minerals list by formally designating copper a critical mineral for the first time — a signal that the federal government itself now views copper as a material essential to national security and economic resilience. The White House followed with Section 232 tariffs of 50 percent on semi-finished copper products. Hailiang’s target products — copper pipe, tube, rod, wire, sheet, fittings, cables, and connectors — sit squarely inside that protected strategic zone.
The question the Hailiang facility forces us to confront is not whether copper is produced in the United States. It is whether the United States controls who processes it, where it goes, and how it is used.
China's Copper Playbook
A September 2025 report from the Coalition for a Prosperous America, How to Counter China’s National Security Threat to U.S. Copper Mills, documents Beijing’s strategy with precision. China now accounts for 44 percent of all global copper smelting production and consumed 57.5 percent of global refined copper demand in early 2026 — while mining less than 9 percent of the world’s supply. China’s copper demand exceeds its domestic production by approximately 13 million metric tons annually, an amount equivalent to roughly half of total global refined copper supply. That structural deficit is not a market inefficiency. It is a pressure that drives Beijing to secure copper supply wherever it can find it — including inside our own borders.
To maintain this industrial machine, China built dominance through massive state subsidies. Companies like Boway Alloy and Jintian Copper received a combined $50 million in direct Chinese government subsidies in 2024 alone.
The CPA report estimates an 82 percent correlation between Chinese copper import volumes and the global price of copper. When China moves, the world price moves. That is the kind of pricing power no adversary should hold over a material this critical to American defense and industry. Moreover, China exploits the United States as a source of raw material.
China is now the largest purchaser of American copper scrap, accounting for more than half of all U.S. scrap copper exports by value in 2024. Chinese smelters running on subsidized overcapacity use that scrap to stay afloat — siphoning it out of the U.S. supply chain at the very moment American mills are competing to source the same feedstock. It is a double squeeze: undercut American producers on price, then drain the raw materials those producers depend on.
CPA senior economist Mihir Torsekar says every Chinese copper investment abroad “strengthens its industrial dominance and military preparedness while undermining America’s ability to defend itself and lead in the clean energy economy.”
Tariff-Jumping: Hailiang's Texas Strategy
When the United States imposed antidumping and countervailing duties on Chinese copper products, Hailiang didn’t change its behavior; instead it changed its geography. In 2010, the Commerce Department imposed antidumping duties on seamless refined copper pipe and tube from China. Hailiang and its peers responded by relocating production to Vietnam. In 2021, the Commerce Department found that Hailiang Vietnam was still dumping copper tube into the U.S. market. New duties were imposed.
So Hailiang moved again — this time to Texas. By producing copper tube and bar on American soil, Hailiang now claims domestic origin and sidesteps the new 50 percent Section 232 tariffs entirely. The trade remedy designed to protect American mills has been turned into a competitive advantage for a company with a documented record of predatory trade practices.
This is not speculation; in 2016, the U.S. Department of Commerce preliminarily found that the “Hailiang Single Entity” sold subject merchandise in the United States at less than normal value. And the pattern extends well beyond the U.S.: in 2025, Canadian trade authorities cited market intelligence that Hailiang copper tubing was entering Canada at “incredibly low prices” through Hong Kong Hailiang Metal Trading Limited. In Australia, domestic producer MM Kembla alleged that Hailiang was selling below fully absorbed manufacturing cost and pressuring the local market.
Hailiang is an important part of the USMCA duty-free regional trade loop for major multinationals like HVAC manufacturers Carrier and Midea. Within North America, Hailiang sources raw copper from Grupo Mexico, imports it to Texas, and process it into highly specialized industrial goods, such as copper coils for heating and cooling equipment. Those items get shipped back to Mexico and go into finished goods bound for the U.S.
Hailiang’s expansion has, in market after market, coincided with dumping allegations, low-price import pressure, third-country production strategies, and injury to domestic producers. That is the record. And now that record belongs inside the United States.
The Texas facility gives Hailiang the ability to reshape the U.S. copper tube and bar market, pressure pricing, shift customer relationships, and increase bargaining power with distributors and original equipment manufacturers — all while shielding itself behind a “Made in America” label.
Sanctioned Supply Chains
One of the most immediate and underreported risks associated with Hailiang’s Texas operations involves its upstream supply chain — specifically, its relationship with Xinjiang Wuxin Copper.
A 2023 report from China News Xinjiang quoted a company executive stating that Xinjiang Wuxin Copper produced 500 tons of copper cathode per day and shipped it to “Hailiang Group and more than 30 downstream enterprises.” Xinjiang Wuxin Copper is a direct subsidiary of Xinjiang Nonferrous Metals Industry, a state-owned enterprise that was added to the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA) Entity List in November 2024 for forced labor violations. Under the UFLPA, goods produced by entities on that list are presumed to have been made with forced labor and are therefore prohibited from entry into the United States.
The question this raises for Hailiang Copper Texas is straightforward: can Hailiang prove, with transaction-level documentation, that the copper used in or supplied to its U.S. operation is free of Xinjiang-origin material and exposure to UFLPA-listed entities? The burden should not fall on American competitors or customs officials to prove contamination. The burden should be on Hailiang to provide full upstream traceability — mine, smelter, refinery, cathode supplier, trader, shipment route, country of transformation, and affiliate involvement.
The Trump Administration, which has rightly been aggressive about UFLPA enforcement, should treat Hailiang Copper Texas as exactly the kind of case the law was designed to address.
The Xinjiang forced labor exposure would be alarming enough on its own. But there is more.
Hailiang Metal Trading Group — part of the broader Hailiang corporate structure — supplies copper to CGN Nuclear Technology Development, a subsidiary of China General Nuclear Power Corporation (CGN). CGN is designated by the U.S. government as a Chinese Military-Industrial Complex company and is formally sanctioned by the U.S. Department of the Treasury. The company has been linked to nuclear weapons production.
So what do we have in Texas? We have a Chinese copper conglomerate whose trading arm supplies a U.S.-sanctioned nuclear weapons-linked entity. The copper it produces in the United States could theoretically travel — directly or through affiliated global distribution channels — into supply chains tied to the Chinese military.
Current U.S. frameworks do not adequately track or control these downstream pathways. There is no mechanism today to ensure that domestically produced copper from a CCP-aligned processor stays in American supply chains rather than being redirected to serve China’s strategic interests under conditions of geopolitical or supply-chain stress.
CCP Alignment Is Not Incidental
Hailiang presents itself as a private company, and technically it is. But in China, “private” does not mean independent. Publicly available Hailiang materials describe CCP-building activities within the company, CCP-related honors, and the founder’s stated personal commitment to “listen to the Party, follow the Party.” Feng Hailiang has made his political alignment explicit.
Hailiang is a national-scale copper processor operating within a political system that expects it to support CCP industrial policy. The Hailiang Copper Texas case raises practical questions about how capacity embedded in the U.S. market may be misdirected or misused under conditions of geopolitical or supply-chain stress. The U.S. should not assume that domestic production automatically equates to domestic availability. If Texas officials need a preview of how this plays out, they should look at what just happened in North Carolina — and how it connects back to copper.
The Boway Group is one of China’s largest, privately held, copper and copper-alloy producers. Despite being private, Boway’s board of directors is stacked with CCP members, including its chairman, who served in the Chinese National People’s Congress. Boway received tens of millions of dollars in Chinese state subsidies in 2024 alone. In 2024, Boway used its solar energy subsidiary, Boviet Solar, to win a $32.6 million state and local incentive package from then-Governor Roy Cooper to build a solar panel factory in Greenville, North Carolina. Cooper referred to Boviet as an “international renewable energy company” at the announcement ceremony, glossing over its parent company’s identity as a CCP-linked copper conglomerate.
Because Boviet was a new construction rather than an acquisition, it fell outside CFIUS jurisdiction entirely. This is one of China’s most effective tools for embedding itself in American supply chains without oversight — and the Boway case illustrates why. A Chinese copper company used a solar subsidiary to get a foothold in the United States, access taxpayer incentives, and gain proximity to American supply chains without a single national security review.
The structural problem underlying both cases is a gap in American foreign investment oversight. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) was designed to screen adversarial takeovers of U.S. businesses, but it rarely covers greenfield investments. Because Hailiang in Texas was new construction, it fell largely outside CFIUS jurisdiction. The same was true of Wellascent Technology’s (aka Jiateng Electric) $100 million copper wire factory in Grand Prairie,Texas, China’s copper tubing giant Golden Dragon’s plant in Pine Hill, Alabama, and Boway’s North Carolina facility. China copper is everywhere in the United States.
Ideally, U.S. policy should categorically prohibit investment, acquisition, or control of U.S. copper assets by entities owned or controlled by the PRC.
U.S. trade policy is built around country of origin — where a product is manufactured. In a vertically integrated, globally networked supply chain, that framework is incomplete. A foreign-controlled entity can manufacture inside the U.S., qualify as domestic, and still rely on opaque upstream sourcing, operate under foreign strategic direction, and distribute its output into global channels aligned with Beijing’s interests. Policymakers should evaluate a “destination-aware” or “deemed export” framework for critical materials like copper — one that considers not only where a product is made, but where it is likely to be directed and how it may ultimately be used.
Texas Must Act Now
There is a narrow window before Hailiang becomes normalized as a domestic copper supplier, integrated into American distribution networks, embedded in customer relationships, and shielded by a political narrative about local jobs. That window is closing.
Governor Greg Abbott and the Texas Legislature should launch a full review of the Hailiang facility, including any state economic development incentives connected to it, and coordinate with federal agencies to determine what national security review, if any, was conducted before this plant was permitted to expand.
The Trump Administration’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) should investigate whether Hailiang Copper Texas can demonstrate full UFLPA-compliant upstream traceability. And Congress should move immediately to close the CFIUS greenfield loophole, add repeat dumping offenders like Hailiang to the Commerce Department’s Entity List, and develop enforcement frameworks that account for where critical minerals go — not just where they are made.
On Monday, June 8, the Trump Administration added A-list China corporations Alibaba, BYD and Baidu to the Defense Department’s list of Chinese military companies under Section 1260H of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). Inclusion on that list does not automatically ban business with the company, but it creates harder compliance, reputational, and supply-chain risks for all involved. U.S. defense contractors will be restricted from doing business with companies on that list starting June 30 with broader indirect restrictions starting June 30, 2027.
China is not hiding its intentions. Beijing’s published industrial strategy for 2025–2027 makes explicit the goal of expanding global copper market share and capturing higher-value segments of the supply chain. China consumes 57.5 percent of the world’s refined copper while mining less than 9 percent of global supply. That structural gap means China will pursue every avenue available to secure the copper it needs — including building production inside the United States and cloaking it in American branding.
The issue is not whether copper is produced in Texas. The issue is whether Texas — and America — control who owns the plant, who controls production, and where the end products go. Right now, on at least two of the counts, the answer is China.
EJ Valentine is Director of Government Relations, and Kenneth Rapoza is Senior Analyst at the Coalition for a Prosperous America.
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