In February, Yaoning “Mike” Sun pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and was sentenced to four years in federal prison. Prior to his arrest, Sun served as campaign manager for the former mayor of Arcadia, California, Eileen Wang, who last month also pleaded guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the PRC. Sentencing is set for Oct. 6, and the agents have plenty to ponder in the meantime.

California Rep. Eric Swalwell, forced out of the 2026 race for governor, hobnobbed with a Chinese spy Rush Limbaugh dubbed “Poonfang,” yet Nancy Pelosi kept Swalwell on the House Intelligence Committee. For 20 years, Sen. Dianne Feinstein maintained on her staff a Chinese spy who even attended consular functions for the San Francisco Democrat. Gov. Gavin Newsom has prioritized Chinese business interests during his administration and, in 2023, treated Xi Jinping to a regal welcome in the City by the Bay.

None of these liaisons drew charges of acting as an agent for the PRC. Sun and Wang may now add to the list California’s recurring governor, Jerry Brown, who intertwined California policy institutions with the People’s Republic of China. How Brown accomplished that goal has now been detailed in Behind the Climate Curtain: China’s Hidden Role in California’s Energy Mandates and University Partnerships, from the National Association of Scholars.

Author Ian Oxnevad, NAS senior fellow for foreign affairs and security studies, notes that in 2002, California Assembly Bill 1493 mandated that the California Air Resources Board (CARB) set emissions standards for new vehicles in the state, which “effectively insulated environmental policies from regular legislative and voter scrutiny.” Like the California Coastal Commission (CCC), CARB is an unelected body.

In September 2013, Jerry Brown met with China’s Xie Zhenhua, then-head of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), to formalize a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between California and China. This was the first-ever MOU between China and a U.S. state, and it formalized cooperation between the PRC and California. A key collaborator was Mary Nichols, who headed CARB between 1975 and 1982 and again for Brown between 2010 to 2018. Nichols, who served as an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), also headed CARB for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (2002-2010) and Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019 and 2020.

As Oxnevad explains, in 2005, CARB established a relationship with China’s Environmental Protection Bureau. After the 2013 memorandum of understanding, CARB hosted five delegations and four webinars with China, and a year later, CARB began co-leading a “Policy Lab” with the China Automotive Technology and Research Center’s Industry Coordination Bureau, developed in collaboration with UC Davis. UC Berkeley is also linked with China’s Tsinghua University, and Assembly Bill 39 established the California-China Climate Institute (CCCI).

Nichols accompanied Brown on a trip to China to meet Chinese automakers and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials. In 2019, Gov. Brown proclaimed that “China can push America, and California can push China.” UC Berkeley would coordinate the policy in tandem with Tsinghua University. From September through December 2021, Oxnevad notes, CARB promoted Dr. Yirui Liang and Jie Zhou, both graduates of Tsinghua University. So was Yanju Chen, who joined CARB in 2015 and gained promotion to “Chief of the Special Assessment Branch in the Air Quality Planning and Science Division (AQPSD).”

“It’s not too much of a simplification to say that what CCCI proposes, CARB imposes,” National Association of Scholars president Peter Wood recently wrote. The climate axis is entirely to China’s benefit, as it now gears up coal-fired power plants. Behind the Climate Curtain proposes several reforms, including amendments and expansions to the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA). Agents of the PRC, whatever their political office, should be made to register as such.

Federal investigations into officials and regulators who have entered into formal agreements with China might yield some company for PRC agents Sun and Wang after their sentencing in the fall. All employees of regulatory agencies should be U.S. citizens, and the study recommends “ratio funding” of public universities with private funds to help prevent university capture and increase public accountability. While legislators investigate it, there are a few things for the people to consider.

In a meeting at the end of May, CARB maintained the cap-and-trade plan, now called “cap and invest,” and pledged fidelity to the state’s 2030 and 2045 “climate targets.” Those are based on the “California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006,” which claimed that “anthropogenic climate change” had led to “higher overall worldwide temperatures, reduced snowpack in the higher elevations, greater fluctuations of temperature and precipitation, global sea level rise,” and so forth.

InUnsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What it Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, Steven Koonin shows that the catastrophic prophecies of “global warming” have gone unfulfilled. California policy shows no recognition of this reality, and it all goes back to Jerry Brown.

His stint in a Catholic seminary was doubtless a draft dodge, but in due time, Brown ordained himself a high priest of climate-change superstition. Brown ran for president in 1976, 1980, and 1992, but the three-time loser had a backup plan. The San Francisco Democrat was fond of touting California as the “world’s fifth largest economy,” and so on, which supposedly made the state akin to an independent nation. It isn’t, and Brown didn’t make it more independent.  

Allegedly an opponent of capital punishment and promoter of human rights, Brown never formally condemned the Tiananmen Square massacre. In Brown’s view, China’s Communist dictatorship is a suitable partner for California. 

“Those of us who don’t live in the Golden State can count ourselves lucky, for now,” Peter Wood warned. “But China’s political strategy and its energy interests don’t stop at the Sierra Nevada. Unless we stop China now, that climate curtain will descend on us.”

Gov. Gavin Newsom, meanwhile, has completed California’s transformation from a destination state to a departure point. The coiffed governor, with ties to the Brown, Pelosi and Getty families, is eager to extend the climate curtain across the nation.