Inside a Michigan town’s unhinged war over a Chinese battery plant.
When Jeff Peticolas was a boy, he wondered how his dad could stomach owning Japanese cameras. Sam Peticolas had survived Pearl Harbor. He’d flown 52 missions against Imperial Japan. He’d nearly drowned after crashing a B-17 into the Pacific and received two Purple Hearts. What was he doing using products like Nikon that were made by his former enemy? Jeez, those are the guys who were shootin’ at you, Peticolas thought, and here you are buying their stuff.
Now 66, Peticolas is tall and sturdy for his age, with gray hair, a gray mustache, and deep-set wrinkles. He feels guilty about having never served. The draft ended two years before he was eligible, not that he particularly wanted to go fight in Vietnam. Instead, Peticolas trained to become an auto mechanic at Ferris State University, where his father taught, in Mecosta County, Michigan, in and around which he has always lived.
But in September 2022, when the county announced that an electric-vehicle-parts manufacturer was coming to town, Peticolas decided it was time to serve his country. The company, Gotion, is the American subsidiary of the world’s second-largest EV-battery maker, a Chinese conglomerate called Gotion High-Tech. The $2.4 billion battery plant promised to bring nearly 2,500 jobs to Michigan’s fifth-poorest county. But as Peticolas saw it, not only was America’s most powerful adversary setting up shop in his hometown, but local officials in Green Charter Township had committed something close to treason by inviting the enemy in. This was nothing short of a communist invasion, in his eyes, and the patriots of Green Charter needed to rise up and confront the Red Peril.
“Yes, I have Chinese stuff in my house all over the place,” Peticolas says. “But it’s way better that they build it in China and sell it here than to build it here and be here. It’s called embedding with the enemy. It’s an age-old military tactic.”