Progressives have long branded President Trump as a stooge for Russia. Yet the more important story may be who President Xi Jinping of China wants in office. Unlike Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, Xi has the financial muscle, ties to business elites, and technical skill to promote his agenda.

And California’s Gavin Newsom is likely to be his favorite in 2028.

Indeed, just after Biden’s poorly-received performance in his June 2024 presidential debate with Trump, the Asia Times, South China Morning Post, Bloomberg, and Business Insider all reported that Beijing liked Newsom as the ideal replacement for the doddering president. The governor was widely seen in China as “a fresh but also positive and more sober-minded politician in the US.”

Certainly Beijing would like to duplicate across the country the unequal relationship that it already has with California under Newsom. What the Golden State has with China resembles a classic colonial tie. China buys roughly $15 billion annually from California, but exports $122 billion to the state. The disparities in such things as electronic machinery are immense, while California dominates mainly in agricultural exports.

California does better with services, notably software and other tech licenses, but that total of $5 billion is chump change compared to the merchandise imbalance.

Historically, many Democrats —like some MAGA Republicans— might see this pattern as harmful to working people who might lose their jobs.

But Newsom is more attuned to the views of his longtime ultra-rich supporters in the Bay Area. He hears not from workers who cannot make a decent living, but from the likes of Apple’s Tim Cook, whose products are largely made in China, and who waxes enthusiastically about a “common future in cyberspace.”

One leading Silicon Valley venture capital firm, Sequoia Capital, even has employed the offspring of China’s Politburo members. China may pose a long-term threat to America, but it helps make Silicon Valley’s billionaires ever richer.

Newsom certainly knows how to play the dutiful vassal. In 2023, the governor and his oligarch friends were clinking glasses at an event in San Francisco hosting President Xi. The dictator’s remarks were followed by a standing ovation.

The fact that Newsom was widely criticized for attempting to clean up San Francisco for Xi’s visit, after failing to do over the past two decades, indicates the lengths he will go to please his overlord.

How about the human rights Newsom carps about in relation to President Trump? Remarkably, California progressives seem to have little trouble kowtowing to the world’s most powerful, and fascistic, authoritarian regime.

Read the rest of this piece at California Post.

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Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him at Substack and on Twitter @joelkotkin.