You won’t read about it in the dominant media, but there was a Bay Area political scene in the 1990s and early 2000s that was influenced to a startling degree by China. What you also won’t read in the pages of most news outlets is that 2024 Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris and likely 2028 White House hopeful California Gov. Gavin Newsom are both products of it.
Harris and Newsom owe their career ascensions to the mentorship of Willie Brown, former mayor of San Francisco and a longtime icon of Democrat machine politics in the Golden State. Brown in turn was unusually close to Chinese kingmakers in the Bay Area who have been tied to espionage activity by the red Beijing regime.
Let’s take one example. Rose Pak was a towering figure in San Francisco’s Chinese-American community. In 2018, Zach Dorfman, senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs, writing for Politico, described her as one of the city’s “preeminent political power brokers” who “was famous for making and unmaking mayors” and city councilmen. Pak was a key ally of Brown.
‘Every Single Hotel Room Is Bugged’
Pak “became especially close to Willie Brown, who... calls her Miss Rose,” The New York Times reported in 2011.
“According to four former intelligence officials, there were widespread concerns that Pak had been co-opted by Chinese intelligence, and was wielding influence over San Francisco politics in ways purposefully beneficial to the Chinese government,” Dorfman related seven years later. Pak regularly conducted VIP trips to China for San Francisco political officials. Brown himself made multiple “trade missions” there during his tenure as SF mayor.
“Political junkets are used by Chinese intelligence for surveillance (‘every single hotel room is bugged,’ one former official told me) and collection purposes, as well as for spotting and assessing potential recruits, said former intel officials,” Dorfman noted.
This is the political tree that bore Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom.
According to a new book, Newsom took heed of his mentor Brown’s close ties to China and pursued a similar tack as he rose in California politics.
In Fool's Gold: The Radicals, Con Artists, and Traitors Who Killed the California Dream and Now Threaten Us All, co-authors Jedd McFatter and RealClearPolitics National Political Correspondent Susan Crabtree detail Newsom’s avid attempts to forge intimate alliances with Chinese business leaders.
Yes, like Willie Brown before him, Gavin Newsom made and still makes special treks to Red Asia.
‘Open the Floodgates to Chinese Money’
“The book describes a Newsom trip to China, where he was hosted in a Shanghai ‘clubhouse’ by Vincent Lo, a Chinese businessman with deep ties to” the Chinese Communist Party, Fox News reports.
Fox provides a key excerpt from the book:
“It was during this meeting that Newsom and Lo hatched a long-term plan to turn San Francisco into the premiere gateway through which Chinese companies could invest and expand their businesses in the United States...
“Upon his return from China, starry-eyed Gavin told his staff that he was going to set aside a couple of million dollars to set up a public-private partnership called ChinaSF that would open the floodgates to Chinese money and business like never before. It turns out the young mayor wasn’t just blowing smoke: three years later, Newsom and Lo joined forces in Shanghai to co‑launch ChinaSF.”
The dire national security implications should be obvious. Lo is linked to the CCP and Newsom offered up California’s cutting-edge business interests to him on a silver platter. The naivety (or was it something else?) of California’s big-box media outlets reporting at the time is damning.
“Vincent Lo has a wish list. He wants what Bay Area entrepreneurship uniquely offers: innovation, high-tech know-how and the ability to turn those attributes into commercial success,” The San Francisco Chronicle’s SFGate reported in 2008. “In return, he is willing to help Bay Area companies thirsting to break into the gigantic Chinese market. ‘We have the resources to pave the way for them,’ he said. Indeed he does.”
That was how the creation of ChinaSF was reported 17 years ago by a veteran San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Ridiculous doesn’t even begin to describe it. The piece provides numerous pregnant hints of nefarious influence.
“Lo works closely with the Bay Area Council” and desires “quid pro quo,” the article states. “San Francisco has such an important role, to be the gateway” to China, Lo is quoted as saying.
Gavin Newsom helped Lo’s dream come true.
“San Francisco is proud of its long-standing relationship with China and its sister city, Shanghai,” Newsom gushed during his 2008 visit to launch Lo’s venture. “ChinaSF builds on this history of shared cultural and economic ties, and strengthens future economic prosperity through enhanced relationships between San Franciscan and Chinese businesses.”
Newsom Still the Gift That Keeps On Giving
McFatter and Crabtree’s “book says that ChinaSF impacted the Bay Area arguably ‘more than any other’ program that Newsom created as mayor and that the initiative hauled in almost $5.5 billion of economic impact to San Francisco from 2008 to 2018 while recruiting 108 Chinese companies into the city,” Fox chronicles.
The relationship endures. Even after he had become governor of California, Gavin Newsom was still expressing his desire to offer the state’s coveted high-tech business knowledge to his longtime friends in China.
“Governor Newsom raised the importance of maintaining open lines of communication and commerce in key California industries, notably high-tech innovation and agriculture,” an official statement from his office read following his 2023 meeting in Beijing with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Today, China is almost universally acknowledged to be the number one geopolitical threat to the United States. That didn’t happen overnight. There were countless outside entities that aided the Chinese in their rise to leading world power status. Many of them came from right here in the United States.
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