Why China back Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom as US president

Progressives have long branded President Trump as a stooge for Russia. 

Yet the more important story may be who President Xi Jinping of China wants in office.

Unlike Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Xi has the financial muscle, ties to business elites, and technical skill to promote his agenda.

And California’s Gavin Newsom is likely to be his favorite in 2028. 

Indeed, just after Biden’s poorly-received performance in his June 2024 presidential debate with Trump, the Asia Times, South China Morning Post, Bloomberg, and Business Insider all reported that Beijing liked Newsom as the ideal replacement for the doddering president. 

The governor was widely seen in China as “a fresh but also positive and more sober-minded politician in the US.”

Certainly Beijing would like to duplicate across the country the unequal relationship that it already has with California under Newsom.  

What the Golden State has with China resembles a classic colonial tie. 

China buys roughly $15 billion annually from California, but exports $122 billion to the state. 

The disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense, while California dominates mainly in agricultural exports. 

California does better with services, notably software and other tech licenses, but that total of $5 billion is chump change compared to the merchandise imbalance.  

Historically, many Democrats –– like some MAGA Republicans –– might see this pattern as harmful to working people who might lose their jobs.

But Newsom is more attuned to the views of his longtime ultra-rich supporters in the Bay Area. 

He hears not from workers who cannot make a decent living, but from the likes of Apple’s Tim Cook, whose products are largely made in China, and who waxes enthusiastically about a “common future in cyberspace.” 

One leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, even has employed the offspring of China’s Politburo members. 

China may pose a long-term threat to America, but it helps make Silicon Valley’s billionaires ever richer.  

Newsom certainly knows how to play the dutiful vassal. 

In 2023, the governor and his oligarch friends were clinking glasses at an event in San Francisco hosting President Xi. The dictator’s remarks were followed by a standing ovation.

The fact that Newsom was widely criticized for attempting to clean up San Francisco for Xi’s visit, after failing to do over the past two decades, indicates the lengths he will go to please his overlord.

How about the human rights Newsom carps about in relation to President Trump?  

Remarkably, California progressives seem to have little trouble kowtowing to the world’s most powerful, and fascistic, authoritarian regime.  

The pro-China stance is also being pushed by Newsom’s other core constituency, the green nonprofits. He has become what one climate policy critic called a “green propaganda enabler.”  

By adopting a renewables-only energy agenda, Newsom and his allies seem determined to offer an enormous economic win for the Middle Kingdom, due to China’s “domination” of electrification and fossil fuel displacement materials, technologies and products.  

Newsom’s obedience follows a longstanding trend for California’s political and economic elites. 

Since the days of former Gov. Jerry Brown, they have been ringing in cash from China, including groups controlled by the Communist Party.

The University of California also has received massive donations from organizations linked to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) –– including a $220 million investment in Berkeley’s joint research institute with “China’s MIT,” Tsinghua University. 

All this from the country that is by far the world’s largest carbon emitter and is actively building many new coal plants.

Some Democrats also have sided with China in the tariff wars, a sharp departure from traditional protectionism embraced by left-of-center politics. 

Newsom has even begged China to have the Golden State exempted from tariffs, as if California were a separate country pleading for its own interests. 

Newsom is not alone in being a convenient figure for Beijing. 

The late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s driver was apparently a Chinese agent, while Congressman Eric Swalwell, a consistent critic of Trump’s alleged Russian ties and a leading candidate to replace Newsom as governor, was involved with an alleged femme fatale agent from China.

One particularly troublesome pattern has been Beijing’s use of immigrant communities: California is home to 40% of the United States’ Chinese community, made up largely of refugees from communism along with an array of opportunists.

In November 2023, Newsom dispatched state Secretary of Government Operations Amy Tong, a first-generation Chinese immigrant, to a “China-US Sister Cities Conference” in Jiangsu Province. 

In October 2024, Tong also attended a China International Friendship Conference in Beijing sponsored by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC). It has been characterized as the “public face” of the CCP’s United Front Work Department (UFWD).

Unlike the Russians, whose policies are crude but who remain economically irrelevant, China tends to strategize long term. 

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In its quest to undermine Western values, notes historian Sean McKeegan, the Chinese strategic approach is “a little subtler and more insidious.” 

China appears to have a long-term strategy that includes penetration of the anti-Trump “resistance.” Most recently, CCP-related groups provided ample funding for the agitation in Minneapolis. 

For China, who sits in the White House plainly matters.

With the ever-unpredictable Trump in office, they cannot count on dutiful obedience from Washington. 

For them, a return to progressive rule in America may insure that China’s ascendancy will not be blocked by the only nation capable of resisting it.  

Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and a senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas-Austin. His Substack is @jkotkin.