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.
Of course, Chinese influence extends well beyond California. Right-wing groups have also been known to align with China, and its wealth has turned Republicans, like former House Speaker John Boehner and former Sen. David Vinter, into Beijing lobbyists and acolytes. But for the most part, China’s best allies are found, perhaps unwittingly, on the progressive Left, particularly in billionaires like Tom Steyer, Bill Gates, as well as powerful foundations like Rockefeller, MacArthur, Hewlett, and a large coterie of donor-funded NGOs. All are devoted to “fighting” climate change, whatever the cost to the unwashed.
As China gears up its increasingly anti-American response to President Trump’s trade antics, including racist AI-generated videos, it also can count on the behind-the-scenes backing of obliging Wall Streeters like Michael Bloomberg, Ray Dalio, and Larry Fink. Business is business, I suppose.
Similarly, Silicon Valley firms seem less committed to fulfilling American aspirations than enabling Xi Jinping’s “China dream” of greater state control, more wealth, and worldwide technological supremacy. Alexander Karp, co-founder of the defense-tech firm Palantir Technologies, has argued in his recent book that most social-media and internet CEOs view the US as a “a dying empire, whose slow descent cannot be allowed to stand in the way of their own rise.” Instead, they have become accomplices helping achieve Beijing’s stated aim of becoming the leading global superpower by 2025.
The rise of pro-China politics can be seen in other countries, too. The recently elected, pro-China Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney advocates for policies that would block oil drilling and place burdens on Canadian mining, agriculture, and industry for environmental reasons, even while stating no objections to China’s coal-plant building spree to power its own solar-panel industry. A greener Canada, as currently defined, will have to genuflect to China to procure the requisite rare earth minerals and the technology for processing the “renewable” energy that Canadian Liberals crave.
“China takes advantage of our liberal institutions — and our comparatively open economies — only to undermine them.”
This alliance between China and the greens can likewise be seen in Britain and Australia, where China has won over allies among center-Left parties. In Labour-run Britain, China is building a mega-embassy in London that will likely help the surveil and harass those who fled Communist Party rule for the assumed safety of Britain. In Germany, China has been very active in trying to evade climate-related duties on their exports. In December 2024, two of the largest German media companies conducted an investigation of “dozens of climate projects in China” that Germany approved for domestic “carbon credits” and found that the Chinese credits were “likely fake and part of a large carbon credit scam.”
Besides appealing to the profit motive of the plutocratic elites, China takes advantage of our liberal institutions — and our comparatively open economies — only to undermine them. The Chinese have become skilled at siphoning off the technological edge of the West. Chinese money also goes to diaspora groups that attack as “racist” anyone who protests CCP policies. For example, the Committee of 100, a China-aligned US group, singled out former Rep. Michelle Steel, a Korean native based in California, for being “racist.” Her real crime? Criticizing her Democratic opponent’s support for a China-backed program promoting Chinese language and culture in elementary schools.
China’s apologists justify their sympathy in large part on concern about our common earthly future. After all, the UN aid chief recently praised Beijing’s green “leadership.” Like almost anything that comes from Turtle Bay, this seems patently absurd. The country won’t stop building coal plants, at least not in the foreseeable future. Its 1,161 coal-power plants account for 55 percent of global carbon emissions from coal. China overall emits far more GHG pollutant than any country and is responsible for more than 30 percent of global carbon emissions as of 2024, twice the American share. Not content to spew at home, it is also building coal plants around the world as coal consumption hits a historic high.
The greens make little effort to demand that China stop its pollution, which no doubt the People’s Republic would refuse. Instead, the greens prefer to turn their ardor against Western industries and consumers. Greens, for example, barely raised a peep after China recently decided to slash its GHG-reduction pledge.
For China, this represents clever realpolitik. Demands for massive purchases of Chinese solar technology, rare earths, and EVs creates a huge boon to the Middle Kingdom. Current green policies necessitate a flood of Chinese EVs, as well as panels from its solar-panel industry, while green obsessions undermine Western industries.
China is already working to make sure that keysolar manufacturing technology is not exported to potential competitors. The country boasts a huge lead in solar battery production, and increasingly dominates the production of the rare earth elements, which also figure prominently in wind turbines, solar panels, and EVs. As American electric-car firms struggle with production and supply-chain issues, China’s Warren Buffett backed BYD has emerged as the world’s top EV manufacturer, with big export ambitions, while Tesla focuses much of its future growth at its Chinese factories.
We already know who pays the price for kowtowing to China. It has meant a massive erosion of jobs and productive capacity. The United States has lost an estimated 3.4 million jobs since China was invited to the World Trade Organization at the turn of the century. The US deficit in trade goods with China has ballooned to $419 billion last year, up from under $10 billion in 1990. China’s ratio of imports to exports was 4 to 1 in 2018. Academics from the climate-industrial complex continue to claim renewable energy is cheaper and the move towards them is “unstoppable,” but virtually all the places with the highest energy costs are generally those with the strictest renewable policies — Germany, Britain, California.
This pro-China regime may have enriched some in the City of London, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, but is clearly no boon to the rest of the Western population. Living standards in the post-industrial West have already worsened, particularly for the middle class. Europe has endured a decade of stagnation, while Americans’ peacetime life expectancy has gone down for the first time. China’s successful wooing of some on the Left seems odd not only because the country is spewing greenhouse gas and repressing its people, including Muslims, but also producing a society where income inequality exceeds that of the United States.
Ultimately, the only way for the West to get to “net zero” by 2050 — something China does puts off for at least another decade — can be accomplished is by squelching all future growth. As Deutsche Bank’s Eric Heyman observes, it would entail catastrophic effects on middle-class living standards in the West, This program, he suggests, can only succeed only by imposing “a certain degree of eco-dictatorship.” China’s leaders, for their part, are quite clear: they will not sacrifice their population to lower living standards, whatever the environmental cost. They understand clearly that declining living standards threaten their hold on absolute power.
The West needs to escape this trap. Fortunately, even some on the Left recognize the danger of dependency on China, with The New Republic recently suggesting that Washington needs to relearn “the language of mining and metallurgy.” The ultra-green Guardian has recently embraced the argument that US manufacturing needs to come back, allowing for “an exit path from neoliberal globalization” and the creation of higher-paid blue-collar jobs.
The West must choose not to surrender its productive economy to the polluting superpower in Asia. The notion of giving up progress and living standards for the middle and working classes — largely to sustain the same classes in China, Russia, and Iran — sounds like a bad bet. Voters will see it that way — and punish ruling classes that acquiesce, sooner or later.
