A new book made headlines this week, one that spotlights California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Chinese and communist connections.
In Fool’s Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All (2025), Susan Crabtree and Jedd McFatter describe an organization called ChinaSF, cocreated by Newsom when he was mayor of San Francisco.
Collusion
“Essentially,” they write, ChinaSF is “a complex bureaucratic mirage used as cover to legitimize the massive transfer of Bay Area technology, property, and wealth to China while streamlining the establishment of Chinese business in the United States.” ChinaSF helps “transform San Francisco into the primary entry point and hub of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in the United States.”
ChinaSF was cofounded with Vincent Lo, president of the Council for the Promotion and Development of Yangtze and a man with both communist and criminal connections.
Newsom and ChinaSF are also featured in last year’s sensation, Peter Schweizer’s Blood Money: Why the Powerful Turn a Blind Eye While China Kills Americans (2024), a book that paints Lo as a friend not only of Newsom but also of the California Triads and the regime in Beijing. Blood Money also links Newsom to two high profile criminals, Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, once head of the Chee Kung Tong, and Allen Leung, eminent in the Hop Sing Tong.
As the Global Security website reports, “the Chinese Communist Party has been tightening its alliance with Chinese organized crime to gain influence outside of China, and U.S. law enforcement investigating Chinese money laundering have found evidence indicating that some schemes involve Chinese government officials and Communist Party elites.”
And let’s add to that U.S. government officials and elites.
Obviously, governors and senior legislators can be useful to foreign powers. As of late 2021, California’s public pension system had “more than $3 billion tied up in Chinese companies, including 14 state-owned enterprises blacklisted by the Trump administration because of their ties to the Chinese military.” Foreign investment can be a big favor.
Note also California’s “foreign policy.” Newsom: “I expressed my support for the One-China policy…as well as our desire not to see independence” for the Republic of China.
From the ground up
But CCP interest in California politicians actually spans a spectrum from high to low. In December an agent of influence, Yaoning “Mike” Sun, was sentenced for collaborating with one John Chen “to get a city councilmember in Southern California elected to office in 2022.”
“The focus on local governments is an intentional effort by Chinese operatives to ‘play a long game,’ said Horace Frank, a former assistant chief of the Los Angeles Police Department who oversaw the counterterrorism bureau. ‘They don’t look for a big bang right away. They are going to build from the ground up.’ ”
In 2022, the U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center noted that “PRC subnational influence operations in the U.S. have recently ‘become more aggressive and pervasive.’”
We can remind ourselves of this when we revisit the investigation of California Congressman Eric Swalwell.
“Swalwell reportedly first came into contact with [suspected spy Christine] Fang when he worked as a Dublin, California city councilmanand she was a member of the Chinese Student Association at California State University East Bay.”
Dublin is a bedroom community founded in 1982.
“According to Axios, Fang also had a sexual relationship with two midwestern mayors, including one who referred to her as his girlfriend.”
Again, all very local.
Corruption central
The problem of CCP infiltration of California government at every level is part of the more general problem of California corruption. Access is easy where civic crime is rampant.
“Political analysts are noting that California has become a new center of political corruption in the United States,” observes Cal Coast News.
In August 2024, The New York Times reported that over the past decade, “576 public officials in California have been convicted on federal corruption charges, according to Justice Department reports, exceeding the number of cases in states better known for public corruption, including New York, New Jersey and Illinois.”
It would be nice to have the state and local conviction totals to add to this number.
The Times noted that a former Los Angeles City Council member, Jose Huizar, was on his way to prison. “FBI agents caught him accepting $1.8 million worth of casino chips, luxury hotel stays, prostitutes and a liquor box full of cash from Chinese developers…. ‘He was the King Kong of L.A. City Hall for many, many years,’ Mack E. Jenkins, chief of the criminal division at the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles, told the court.”
The needs of the corruptniks are simple: cash and prostitutes. With both Beijing and criminals competing for influence, they should be able to split the costs and share the asset.
Why?
How can all this be? The New York Times, of all sources, has a concise and on-point answer: “Prosecutors say that corruption is rising in California cities as one-party rule, inattentive voters and weakened news media have reduced the traditional checks on power.”
No leg of that three-legged stool is going to be fixed anytime soon. Party on, Gavin and friends. □
James Roth works for a major defense contractor in Virginia.
