California’s China Habit – Billions Out the Door, Yet Accountability Is Missing
From pandemic masks and public pensions to transit equipment and climate agreements, California has built substantial exposure to China. Finding anyone willing to own the policy is considerably harder.
By Christine Bish
California politicians have spent years warning residents about dependency: dependency on oil, cars, plastic bags, natural gas and apparently anything else that still works during a blackout. But when the dependency runs through Beijing, Sacramento suddenly develops an appreciation for nuance.
A review of California contracts, pension holdings, transportation purchases and policy agreements reveals substantial exposure to Chinese companies and government institutions.
This does not prove that Beijing controls California—or that every relationship is corrupt. What it demonstrates is more traditionally Californian: a sprawling bureaucracy in which everyone participated, billions of dollars moved, strategic dependencies accumulated and nobody appears responsible for the whole thing.
The billion-dollar mask adventure
In April 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration committed approximately $1.045 billion to Chinese manufacturer BYD for N95 respirators and surgical masks. California advanced the company $495 million.
BYD then missed its initial federal certification deadline and refunded $247.5 million. The agreement was amended, certification was eventually obtained, and California announced another approximately $316 million mask agreement that July. The original contract became public only after sustained pressure.
This is not accurately summarized as ‘California spent a billion dollars on defective masks.’ The actual story is less cinematic but more troubling: California made an enormous emergency commitment, supplied a massive advance payment and initially concealed important contract details while certification was still unresolved.
Apparently, the state’s celebrated precautionary principle does not always survive contact with a billion-dollar purchase order.
Buses, subway cars and port cranes
By 2018, Southern California public agencies had provided more than $330 million in contracts, grants and subsidies connected to BYD buses, trucks and industrial equipment. Los Angeles Metro’s first five BYD buses were removed from service after less than five months amid documented mechanical, reliability and range problems. Los Angeles Times reporting also identified BYD-financed travel, campaign contributions and personal or family relationships surrounding some local procurement decisions.
Those facts establish precisely why disclosure and independent oversight are supposed to happen before a contract is awarded—not after reporters begin asking uncomfortable questions.
Los Angeles Metro separately signed a $178 million base contract with the state-owned China Railway Rolling Stock Corporation for subway cars. Contract options could have raised the total to $647 million, although Metro did not exercise them. The agreement was approved through Metro’s governing structure.
The Port of Long Beach also awarded Chinese state-owned ZPMC a $143.5 million crane contract. Federal authorities later raised national-security concerns about remote access and unauthorized communications equipment found in ZPMC cranes at American ports.
That does not prove Long Beach’s cranes were used for espionage. It does raise a question California officials should have considered sooner: Should critical American infrastructure depend on equipment supplied by a company controlled by a strategic adversary?
California’s retirement money
Comparing CalPERS and CalSTRS international-equity holdings reported on June 30, 2025, with the Pentagon’s June 8, 2026 list of Chinese military companies produced approximately $3.04 billion in directly matched securities. The largest identified exposures included Tencent, Alibaba, BYD, Baidu, CATL and WuXi AppTec.
The dates matter. The holdings predated the Pentagon list by roughly a year, and inclusion on that list is not a criminal conviction or automatic sanction. The comparison does establish a reason for the pension systems to disclose their current positions and explain what happens when a company in California retirees’ portfolios is subsequently identified as a national-security concern.
Delegation is a management structure—not witness protection.
From commercial access to policy access
Former Gov. Jerry Brown signed a major climate memorandum with China’s National Development and Reform Commission in 2013. After leaving office, Brown helped establish the California-China Climate Institute at UC Berkeley with Chinese climate official Xie Zhenhua.
Assemblymember Ed Chau later authored AB 39, which placed the institute into California law. The Legislature passed it, and Newsom signed it.
Newsom’s 2023 China trip produced additional agreements. The principal memorandum calls for cooperation with China’s central economic-planning agency involving electric transportation, energy storage, hydrogen, power grids, policy exchanges, research, pilot projects, personnel visits and training. The memorandum is public.
The agreement assigns CARB, CalEPA, the Natural Resources Agency and the California Energy Commission to develop an implementation action plan. It designates the Berkeley institute as California’s point of contact.
The document is voluntary, nonbinding and does not automatically appropriate money. But ‘nonbinding’ does not mean meaningless. It creates official points of contact, recurring access, information exchanges and a framework through which future policy can develop.
So who made these decisions?
The short answer is: many officials did. Jerry Brown built the early state-level relationships. Ed Chau authored the institute legislation. The Legislature approved it. Newsom signed it and later executed new agreements. Cabinet agencies implement them. UC Berkeley houses the designated institute. Transit and port boards approved major purchases. CalPERS and CalSTRS boards oversee the retirement assets.
The genius of the arrangement is bureaucratic. Responsibility has been distributed so widely that every participant can point to somebody else.
California did not become dependent on Chinese supply chains, capital markets, industrial equipment and policy institutions in one dramatic act. Officials built that exposure contract by contract, mandate by mandate and memorandum by memorandum.
California needs an audit based on records, not rumors. The central question is not whether every China-linked agreement is sinister. It is whether California officials have measured the combined financial, security and policy costs of the dependency they created.
So far, California taxpayers have received plenty of memoranda, contracts and carefully divided authority. Accountability appears to be the one product nobody remembered to order.
RECEIPTS, NOT RHETORIC: Read the full 10-page documented report
FULL DOCUMENTATION: California-China Dependency: Full Report
A glaring example of Democrats are not anywhere near America First, rather support China, which if one thinks about it that is how socialism works tear down your own Country while supporting those who want just that. I would point out the people of California keep electing the politicians running things however, without honest elections and the very people in charge running the elections who's to say things can be fixed ever.