Recent revelations that the University of California received massive donations from organisations linked to China’s Communist Party — including a $220 million investment in Berkeley’s joint research project with Tsinghua University — may have elicited a harsh reaction from the Trump administration. But it should not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the state’s increasingly dependent relationship with China.
For a generation, California’s political and economic elites have been eager to abase themselves for Chinese money. This started under Jerry Brown, who assiduously worked to maintain close ties, but his successor, Gavin Newsom, has gone further, welcoming links with groups controlled by the Communist Party.
Newsom, of course, was the first US Governor to visit China in four years. In 2023, the Governor went to Beijing to kiss the ring and explore “collaboration” with the Communist regime, pleading for statewide carveouts from China’s tariffs. Then a month later, Xi Jinping visited San Francisco, where Newsom and the rest of the state establishment gave him a standing ovation.
This royal treatment might seem odd considering how critical Newsom has been of other “dictators”. Over the last eight years, the California governor has repeatedly attacked Trump over his alleged threat to democracy. But he remains curiously silent on the world’s most powerful — and fascistic — authoritarian regime. To this day, the California Governor has continued to send fraternal missions to China, partnering with organisations controlled, like much of everything, by Communist Party operatives. Clearly, there are some double standards here.
Such subservience makes sense given an economic relationship that already resembles a classic colonial tie. China 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.
This dependency may alarm some in Washington, but it conforms to the preferred style of many California progressives. Free trade plays to the state’s deindustrialisation and climate agendas, raising prices inexorably on California companies and households. Even during the Biden years, California greens opposed tariffs on Chinese EVs and some have sought to “take out” Tesla, the only EV-maker producing in the state.
Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: California Governor's office, via Flickr under CC 2.0 License.
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