By choosing to travel to Israel and China this month, California Gov. Gavin Newsom is placing himself at the center of two delicate diplomatic arenas President Joe Biden is already navigating, underscoring the balancing act Newsom must walk as a key Biden ally and a politician seeking to raise his own profile.
The planned China visit will drive home California’s outsize role in shaping U.S. and global climate policy, as well as the ambitions of its leader. One Newsom supporter told the Chronicle the governor will be seen as a “mini president” while in China; a critic referred to the trip as “the make-believe president’s tour.”
It’s normal for California governors, as leaders of the nation’s most populous state and the world’s fifth-largest economy, to travel internationally. Newsom’s predecessor, Jerry Brown, traveled to China twice during his time as governor. But the timing of Newsom’s visit to Israel as the country wages a devastating war, and to China as U.S. relations with the global superpower strain over issues including alleged human rights violations, brings unique pressure.
His trip to Israel comes just two days after Biden visited the country. “I’m on my way to Israel,” Newsom said in a post on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. “I’ll be meeting with those impacted by the horrific terrorist attacks and offering California’s support.”
Biden has similarly offered U.S. support to the country and harshly condemned attacks by the militant group Hamas that have killed more than 1,400 people and sparked the latest war in the region. In response, Israel has cut off food, power and water to the Gaza Strip, where Hamas is based, trapping more than 2 million Palestinians in the war zone and displacing roughly half from their homes. The Gaza Health Ministry says more than 3,700 people have been killed in Gaza since the war began.
The governor’s trip comes as Democrats seek to navigate deep fissures in the party over the conflict, with many centrists pledging broad support for Israel and many progressive members calling for an immediate cease-fire.
A focus on the environment in China
Newsom’s trip to China will focus on environmental issues. As global temperatures continue to break records, experts say collaboration between China and California, the world’s second- and fifth-largest economies, is key.
Newsom will spend a week in the country and will travel to Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai and other Chinese cities, meeting with local leaders and signing agreements to cooperate on efforts to reduce global warming. He plans to discuss clean power and biodiversity, and will visit an offshore wind facility, travel by high-speed rail and tour Tesla’s huge electric vehicle plant in Shanghai. California, meanwhile, is building its own offshore wind industry, struggling with a seemingly unfinishable high-speed rail project and seeking to expand its own electric car market.
Newsom has underscored California’s ties to China in the lead-up to the trip. More than 4% of Californians and more than 10% of Bay Area residents are of Chinese descent, according to census data.
California has traditionally been a major source of venture capital financing in China, though such investment in China has declined in recent years. Not only has the country’s economy faltered, but the U.S. government has sought to curb investment in China, said Chenggang Xu, an economist at Stanford University.
Moreover, many Chinese tech entrepreneurs either studied in California or have close ties to the Golden State, Xu said. And many tech workers in California are of Chinese descent.
“It’s an intimate relationship,” he said.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks at the Presidio Tunnel Tops before signing a new climate agreement in San Francisco last October.
Jess Chiu/Associated Press 2022Newsom and his staff are coordinating closely with the Biden administration, including Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s office and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. The coordination illustrates the dance Newsom has to perform to not upstage the president as he wages a competitive reelection battle, and to navigate the complicated relationship between China and the United States.
Newsom spokesperson Anthony York acknowledged the geopolitical dynamics at play.
“The governor wants to send the clear message that climate cooperation needs to move forward regardless of what’s happening on the geopolitical front,” York said. “To solve this global problem, we need some level of global cooperation. But it’s delicate.”
“We want to make sure we don’t get over our skis in any way,” York added.
The human rights dilemma
The dynamics include a governor who has been outspoken on civil rights visiting a country under fire over them.
The United States has sanctioned China over its crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong. Biden also signed a law that blocks imports from China’s Xinjiang region unless businesses demonstrate they were not produced using forced labor, after the U.S. accused the Chinese government of human rights abuses against Muslim Uighurs there. The Chinese government has denied those allegations, characterizing its actions in the region as combating a separatist movement.
Newsom spokesperson Erin Mellon told reporters that the governor doesn’t intend to discuss human rights concerns in China and plans to leave that to the Biden administration.
“Our visit, like we’ve talked about, is pretty wholly focused on climate,” she said. “We are obviously a state, so I think we look to our partners on federal issues like that.”
Brown, the former governor, said he doesn’t believe it’s appropriate to bring up human rights issues on the visit because it would undercut Newsom’s ability to reach agreements on climate issues.
“I would leave the denunciations to Washington,” Brown said. “Climate is so big and so important that it’s worth one trip where that’s the only thing that gets talked about.”
But Andrew Yeh, deputy director of the China Strategic Risks Institute think tank in London, said he doesn’t see challenging China over human rights issues as necessarily undermining work on climate change.
“I would challenge the false dichotomy between either talking about climate or talking about human rights,” Yeh said. “Often there’s this perception that China won’t do what we want on the climate or the environment if we don’t shut up about human rights. I think that’s false.”
He noted that if Newsom doesn’t bring up the issue in his meetings, he risks allowing the Chinese government to use his visit to downplay criticism.
“The Chinese government frequently invites delegations of government leaders over to China in the hope of giving the image of international credibility and agreement with the Chinese Communist Party’s aims and objectives,” he said.
‘You have to be very careful’
Garry South, a longtime Democratic political consultant who worked with Newsom on his first run for governor, said traveling internationally as a governor is “always a balancing act.”
“You’re kind of viewed as a mini-president in a sense,” he said. “You do have to be very careful when you go to foreign countries, particularly ones that are hostile to the U.S., because you’re going to have a lot of people you meet trying to ferret information out of you you shouldn’t be revealing, or planting ideas in your head that they want you to promulgate when you get home.”
South traveled with former Ohio Gov. Richard Celeste to Russia in the early ’90s, just before the fall of the Soviet Union. He recalled nightly briefings on the trip during which he and other staff speculated about who of the people they had met that day might be spies.
South also traveled to Japan, Hong Kong and Canada with Celeste, and with former California Gov. Gray Davis to Mexico. Newsom, he said, will be cognizant not to step on Biden’s toes and will be keenly aware that his trip will be seen as a political move, and possibly groundwork for a presidential run.
“He’ll be careful and cautious,” South said of Newsom. “You have to be careful that the foreign country you’re visiting doesn’t look at you as or treat you as a surrogate for the president of the United States, because you’re not.”
Costs for Newsom and his staff on both trips will be covered by the California State Protocol Foundation, Mellon said. The Protocol Foundation often uses philanthropic donations to cover costs for some activities by the governor, including foreign travel. Newsom hasn’t reported soliciting any donations specifically for the trips, but earlier this year transferred $1 million to the foundation from leftover money he had raised to pay for his inauguration festivities.
Already, Newsom’s China trip is generating some criticism back home — from both the right and the left.
“It strikes me as the make-believe president’s tour,” said Assembly Republican Leader James Gallagher, R-Yuba City (Sutter County). “Is he going to have a stern conversation with (Chinese leaders) about the need to increase human freedoms? Or is that only a lecture back here in the states?”
Fatima Iqbal-Zubair, chair of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive Caucus, said the timing of Newsom’s trip is disappointing after he vetoed bills that would have banned caste discrimination and required that parents’ support for their child’s chosen gender identity be a factor in custody hearings.
Newsom’s priority should be governing California, she said. Although the trip will provide him a unique opportunity to partner with China to combat climate change, she said, he’s leaving while there’s important work to do protecting people marginalized in California.
“I question where his focus is,” she said. “Does this trip need to happen right now?”
Christian Leonard and the Associated Press contributed to this report.
Reach Sophia Bollag: sophia.bollag@sfchronicle.com
