The California-China Connection: A Movie Crying Out for A Producer

The great Joel Kotkin, who I love to read because ause of hus outstanding insights into urbanism and his philosophical treatises on culture, growth and so much more, may have put out his best article ever. It’s titled “How China Co-opted the Green Movement: Development for Beijing, Degrowth for Us” and is a masterpiece explanation of how the Communist Chinese Party that runs the Red Dragon empire cons and co-opts Westerners at every turn.

The following is the introduction to this wonderful post at Unherd:

Rising empires require collaborators to expand their influence and win over adversaries. In this respect, China and other anti-Western regimes increasingly count on green activists, investors, and media to advance their interests. Overall, the greens see China as “pivotal” in the global green-energy transition, as states Sustainability Magazine.

Indeed, over the past decade, the green movement has successfully trolled for big money from groups with strong links to the Chinese Communist Party, as well as some dollops from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which has cynically backed efforts to curb the West’s production of natural gas, the easier to deepen its own energy dominance; and Qatar, known for financing Hamas and other Islamist groups.

Nowhere is the penetration more complete than in the universities, where Chinese and Qatari money are behind the largest proportion of the $29 billion of foreign money sunk into American universities between 2021 and 2024. This, and similar funds flooding Canadian, Australian, and British Universities, buy good will and political influence. Chinese students at institutions like Stanford are also closely monitored by the Beijing regime’s agents in order to stamp out or at least identify dissidents — and when possible, to purloin research for the motherland.

Climate change has emerged as one critical element of this collaboration. The Washington Free Beacon has reported on millions of dollars from a climate nonprofit called Energy Foundation China, run primarily out of Beijing by former Communist Party cadres, flooding campuses. The beneficiaries include the University of Maryland and Harvard (where a professor was arrested for lying to the FBI about his China ties, and then appointed at a Chinese university). The consulting firm Strategy Risks argued Harvard also hosted training sessions for XPCC, a Chinese paramilitary organization, subject to sanctions for being involved in the suppression of the Uyghurs.

The belle of the China ball, not surprisingly, is California. Engagement with the People’s Republic has been long required for elites in the Golden State, whose imports from China are roughly nine times its exports. For China, it is a wonderful place to do business. The country runs a roughly $107 billion trade surplus with California, and the disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense. California fares better with services, notably software and other tech licenses as well as universities, but this only amounts to $5 billion. As climate policy hurts average Californians through deindustrialization, high energy prices, and climate regulation, it enriches China.

The outreach began under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s predecessor Jerry Brown, who now chairs the legislatively created California-China Climate Institute at the law school of the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley has been particularly egregious in its embrace of China. So much so that the Government Select Committee on the CCP wrote an open letter to the school, venting “grave concern” about its “joint institute with state-controlled Tsinghua University and the Shenzhen government” and warning that Berkeley is facilitating Chinese espionage of American research.

Newsom is clearly a vassal in training, traveling to China and greeting Xi like a visiting sovereign when the dictator came here. Ahead of the visit, China and California issued a “first-of-its-kind” joint declaration pledging cooperation on subnational climate action, such as “aggressively cutting greenhouse gas emissions, transitioning away from fossil fuels, and developing clean energy.”

Not surprisingly, Beijing dreams of the pliable Newsom as President Trump’s successor. In July 2024, not long after Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance, several media outlets — including the Asia Times, South China Morning Post, and Business Insider — reported that Newsom was seen by the regime as “a fresh but also positive and more sober-minded politician in the US” who “could be a cool head among this anti-China US consensus”.

The greens are also “all in” for this kowtowing behavior. The Hill, quoting Alex Wang — a UCLA professor and former Natural Resources Defense Council attorney who helped establish the NRDC’s China office — praised the governor for being “engagement-oriented, at a time when engagement is seen as a dirty word by some people” and sending “a green light for more collaboration” with China “to move as quickly as possible on climate action and climate research.”

But it’s not just California politicians and NGOs on the Chinese green gravy train. The Energy Foundation has also lavished large grants on groups like the Rocky Mountain Institute, whose policy agenda includes the electrification of homes and EV mandates that benefit the Middle Kingdom. This reflects China’s industrial strategy that is in part built around capturing new markets, of which “green” products like EVs and solar panels are critical components.

The CEO and president of Energy Foundation China is Ji Zou, who previously served as a deputy director-general of China’s National Center for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation, under the government’s National Development and Reform Commission. In 2013 and 2014, he served as a Chinese representative to the UN Intergovernmental Committee of Experts on Sustainable Development Financing.

Read the entire article to get the full picture, but notice how the NRDC and The Energy Foundation have become two points of the Communist Chinese spear. The NRDC, of course, is, effectively, a Rockefeller enterprise with overlapping board memberships among itself, the Open Space institute, and the Catskill Mountainkeeper as well as other family enterprizes and spawn. The Energy Foundation is majorly funded by hedge-fund trust-funder Nat Simons and his wife, who are the principals of the nefarious Sea Change Foundation and are big-time solar special interests.

What we see here is the unholy alliance between Chinese Communists and America’s gentry class, which is far more loyal to globalism in all its black drag than the U.S., the West, or the plight of the common for which they routinely and falsely pretend to speak. They are the elites who have set and run most of the NGOs methidically destroying Wester civilization with the hope of transitioning into a new global order of elites to replace the one we have with something far more powerful and in total control of…us. It's the California-China Connection and it cries out for a movie starring Gene Hackman if he were but still alive.

#California #China #CCP #ChineseCommuists #JoelKotkin #Unherd