Beijing at the Ballot Box: How China Has Reached into California's Political and Electoral Infrastructure – Mike Cargile

By Mike Cargile

California is the largest state in the union, the world's fourth-largest economy, first in the

nation in agriculture, technology, energy, and entertainment, and home to more people

than any other state. Now imagine an adversarial foreign power controlling that state's

government, its universities, its economic institutions, and its elected class.

You don't have to imagine it. The documented record, court cases, guilty pleas,

congressional testimony, and California's own statutes and diplomatic agreements

show the Chinese Communist Party has spent more than a decade building exactly that

kind of access.

Part I: Agents in office

The Fang Fang network (2011–2015). A Chinese national who went by Christine Fang enrolled at California State University, East Bay, in 2011 and built a base in Bay Area Democratic politics over the next several years. She fundraised for and around then Rep. Eric Swalwell's 2014 campaign, helped place an intern in his office, and built relationships with other officials including Reps. Ro Khanna and Judy Chu and then Fremont Mayor Bill Harrison. U.S. officials told Axios the FBI assessed Fang was tasked by China's Ministry of State Security to cultivate local politicians early in their careers. Fang left the country abruptly in 2015 as the FBI investigation closed in; no U.S. charges have been filed against her. A separate, longstanding thread involves Sen. Dianne Feinstein, whose office employed a staffer for roughly two decades who the FBI later assessed was a suspected Chinese intelligence asset; Feinstein was not accused of wrongdoing and cooperated with the investigation once notified.

The Arcadia case (2020–2026). Eileen Wang, elected to the Arcadia City Council in 2022 and later chosen as the city's mayor, pleaded guilty in 2026 to acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government. Her fiancé and campaign manager, Yaoning "Mike" Sun — arrested in Chino Hills in February 2024 — was convicted of the same offense and is serving a four-year sentence. According to Wang's plea agreement, from late 2020 through 2022, overlapping with her council campaign, she and Sun operated a Chinese-language website that functioned as a conduit for PRC propaganda, taking direct editorial instructions from Chinese officials over WeChat. She is, per DOJ officials, the only sitting U.S. elected official convicted to date of acting as a covert Chinese agent.

These cases are corroborated by the broader intelligence assessment on record: the

Director of National Intelligence's February 2023 Annual Threat Assessment stated that

Beijing has "redoubled its efforts to build influence at the state and local level" on the

theory that local officials are more pliable than federal ones.

Part II: Cyber espionage touching California institutions

Chinese state-linked hacking groups have repeatedly touched California-based

networks. Salt Typhoon, attributed to China's Ministry of State Security, breached at

least nine major U.S. telecom carriers beginning in 2024 and, per Recorded Future

reporting, targeted networking equipment at UCLA and the California State University

Chancellor's Office between December 2024 and January 2025. This clearly demonstrates a standing Chinese capability and appetite for penetrating institutions embedded in California's political and technology establishment.

Part III: Beyond politics — espionage and military-recruitment cases

Linwei Ding — economic espionage (Northern District of California). A former

Google software engineer based in Newark and Mountain View, Ding was convicted in

January 2026 on seven counts of economic espionage and seven counts of trade

secret theft. Between May 2022 and April 2023, prosecutors showed, Ding uploaded

more than 1,000 unique files — over 2,000 pages covering the architecture of Google's

custom AI chips and supercomputing networking systems — from Google's network to

his personal cloud account, while secretly holding a CTO role at one PRC-based

startup, founding a second, and applying to a PRC government "talent program" in

Shanghai.

Yuance Chen and Liren "Ryan" Lai — military recruitment (Northern District of California). Charged in June 2025, this is a direct Ministry of State Security operation, though the defendants were arrested outside California. In January 2022, Lai and Chen facilitated a $10,000 MSS cash dead-drop at a day-use locker at a recreational facility in Livermore, California. Beginning in 2022, at Lai's direction, Chen visited a U.S. Navy recruitment center in San Gabriel, California, photographed a bulletin board listing recent Navy recruits — many of whom listed China as their hometown — and transmitted the images to an MSS intelligence officer. Chen also contacted a Navy service member over social media and later reported details from a tour of the USS Abraham Lincoln back to the MSS.

A national-security incident worth a caveat. In December 2024, Yinpiao Zhou, a Chinese national and naturalized U.S. citizen living in Brentwood, California, was arrested at SFO — moments before boarding a flight to China — after flying a drone for nearly an hour over Vandenberg Space Force Base. He pleaded guilty to airspace and registration violations.

A California resident targeted by transnational repression, even though the arrest

was elsewhere. In April 2023, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York

charged two men with running a secret Chinese Ministry of Public Security "police

station" out of a Manhattan office. Court documents allege the station was tasked in

2022 with helping locate a pro-democracy activist living in California — meaning a

California resident was a documented target even though the enforcement action

happened elsewhere.

Part IV: The voting-machine supply chain question California law restricts counties to three certified vendors — Dominion (44 counties), ES&S (a handful, including Alpine and Amador), and Hart InterCivic. All three rely on global supply chains that include Chinese-made components; a 2019 Interos study found roughly 20% of one widely used machine's components traced to China or Russia, and all three CEOs acknowledged Chinese-sourced parts (touchscreens, capacitors, programmable logic devices) under direct questioning at a 2020 House Administration Committee hearing.

Part V: California's institutional ties to Beijing

The October 2023 NDRC–California MOU. Governor Newsom signed a Memorandum

of Understanding with China's National Development and Reform Commission in Beijing

on October 25, 2023, renewing a 2015 low-carbon-development agreement. On its face,

the document is a climate and clean-energy cooperation framework covering

decarbonization, EV/ZEV adoption, offshore wind, and grid technology, with the

California-China Climate Institute at UC Berkeley and NDRC's Energy Research

Institute designated as points of contact.

The legitimate critique of the MOU is that catch-all language ("other mutually agreed

activities," Section II(10); "any other mutually agreeable forms of cooperation," Section

IV(6)) leaves the actual scope of cooperation to whatever the parties later agree to, off

the page, with minimal public visibility.

AB39 and the California-China Climate Institute. AB39 (2021) formalized the California-China Climate Institute at UC Berkeley and statutorily requires it to "operate in partnership" with Tsinghua University's Institute of Climate Change and Sustainable Development, while drawing guidance from the California State Assembly, State Senate, and Governor's office. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute has separately flagged Tsinghua as a high-risk institution over alleged links to state cyber and military adjacent research. Specifically it reads:

Assembly Bill No. 39, Chapter 227, Article 8. California-China Climate Institute 92687. (a)(4) The institute will, to the extent possible, receive guidance and support from expert policy, government, business, academic, and climate leaders and advisory committees, including, but not necessarily limited to, the following state entities: (A) The California State Assembly. (B) The California State Senate. (C) The office of the Governor. (D) The California Environmental Protection Agency. (E) The Natural Resources Agency. (F) The University of California. (G) The Department of Food and Agriculture.

Paragraph (b)(4) states: Providing training to Californian and Chinese researchers, scientists, technical experts, policymakers, and other leaders to advance critical climate and environmental policies, including, but not necessarily limited to, air quality, carbon pricing, carbon emissions, clean energy, and innovation.

Economic exposure. The trade relationship is large, recent, and shifting fast. Per ITA/Commerce Department data, total two-way trade between California and China reached $137.8 billion in 2024, with California importing $122.8 billion in Chinese goods that year — the largest China-import total of any U.S. state — against roughly $15.1 billion in California exports to China. That relationship has since contracted sharply amid tariffs: by 2025, California's exports to China had fallen to about $10.3–10.7 billion (a drop of roughly 32% year-over-year, per California Chamber of Commerce data), and imports from China fell to roughly $76 billion.

On the investment side, in November 2025 (The Center Square, GV Wire) revealed that CalPERS has committed $282 million since 2022 to HongShan, the Chinese venture capital firm spun out of Sequoia Capital's China business in 2023 — with $59.3 million actually invested and an estimated $7.7 million loss as of March 2025. HongShan's portfolio includes Qihoo 360, a cybersecurity firm blacklisted by both the Commerce and Defense Departments over ties to the People's Liberation Army. The House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party has separately investigated HongShan, and its report flagged that Sequoia's 2023 split into HongShan may have been structured in part to insulate certain capital flows from the regulatory scrutiny they'd otherwise face.

California's largest public pension fund continues to maintain financial ties to entities

under active U.S. national-security scrutiny, years after the first round of controversy

and despite an existing OFAC-driven divestment framework.

In April 2020, the Newsom administration also signed a roughly $1 billion no-bid mask

deal with Chinese manufacturer BYD, followed by a $316 million contract that July; BYD

missed delivery deadlines and initially failed federal certification.

Part VI: Can foreign influence over California's government translate into control over election outcomes?

Has an enemy with real, documented footholds in California's political class, its universities, its economy, voting-machine supply chain and potentially its electoral hardware use this to exploit our elections? Maybe.

But the honest answer is upstream of the machines entirely: who gets onto the voter rolls in the first place, and whether anyone can verify, after the fact, that the person who cast a given ballot was who they claimed to be.

California's statutory provisions, stacked together, remove the very information a later audit would need to check anything against.

• Motor-voter registration through the DMV (required by the National Voter Registration Act since 1993) expanded rolls automatically, while California has treated the NVRA's Section 8 requirement to remove ineligible voters as permissive rather than mandatory — expanding the rolls without a matching commitment to prune them.

• AB60 (2013) authorized driver's licenses for undocumented residents, and AB1461 (2015) made DMV voter registration automatic for licensees — with election officials statutorily barred from cross-checking DMV or DHS data on citizenship status (Elections Code § 2263(d)). In practice, that means citizenship at registration rests on self-attestation with no independent verification layer behind it.

• AB1921 and AB306 eliminated any chain-of-custody requirement for mail ballots, permitting an unlimited number of ballots to be collected and returned by a third party ("ballot harvesting") without recording who that person is or their relationship to the voter.

• SB286 repealed the requirement that in-person voters state their name and address aloud for confirmation.

• SB72 instituted same-day registration at every polling place, and AB860 mandated a ballot be mailed to every active registrant.

• SB1174, effective 2025, bars any local government from requiring ID to vote or submit a ballot at all.

A risk-limiting audit can verify that a paper ballot was counted correctly. It cannot tell you whether the person who cast that ballot under a same-day registration, with no photo ID, and no cross-check against an existing roll, was in fact the eligible citizen they claimed to be — because the system never captured that information to begin with. You can't audit a fact you never recorded. That is the distinction between a system that is merely permissive and one that is, for the specific question of voter identity and eligibility, structurally unauditable after the fact.

California has built a system with a documented verification gap, at the same time it has allowed a documented pattern of CCP political cultivation and institutional entanglement to deepen — and no one has ever been able to rule out the former being used to exploit the latter, because the system was not built to allow that check.

Part VII: What's at stake

California sends 52 members to the House of Representatives and elects 2 U.S.

Senators (more federal representation than the 22 smallest states combined). A shift of

even a handful of California's House seats has, in recent cycles, been the difference

between a governing majority and the minority. If the verification gap described above is

ever exploited at meaningful scale, by any actor, foreign or domestic, the effect would

not stay contained within California. It would directly shape control of the House, the

Senate map, and by extension the entire federal legislative agenda: appropriations,

judicial confirmations, oversight authority, and war powers all run through the chamber

California's delegation sits in.

Part VIII: The remedy — legislative first, executive as last resort

The near-term, least drastic fix: the SAVE Act. The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE Act / SAVE America Act, H.R. 22 and successors) would amend the National Voter Registration Act to require documentary proof of citizenship — a passport, birth certificate, or equivalent — before a state can accept a federal voter registration, including under same-day registration. It has passed the House twice (April 2025 and February 2026), but as of June 2026 has not cleared the Senate, where it needs 60 votes and Republicans hold 53. This is the direct legislative fix for the specific gap described in Part VI: it would require exactly the kind of documentary verification at the point of registration that California's current statutes dispense with.

The last resort: the Guarantee Clause as an executive mandate. If Congress cannot

act (and the SAVE Act's Senate math suggests it may not be able to) Article IV, Section

4's guarantee of a "Republican Form of Government" and becomes an affirmative,

enforceable duty resting on the President, not merely a dormant grant of authority.

Article 4, Sect. 4 – The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union, a

Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and

on Application of the Legislature , or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be

convened) against domestic Violence.

The Clause's verbs "guarantee," "protect against Invasion," "protect against domestic Violence" are performative and can only be discharged by an actor capable of administrative and physical action, which points to the Executive rather than Congress or the Courts. Examples of Executive Primacy in this space are: Tyler's recognition of the Rhode Island government during the Dorr Rebellion (1842), Eisenhower's deployment of the 101st Airborne to enforce desegregation in Little Rock (1957), Reconstruction-era military governors, and George H.W. Bush's 1992 invocation of the Domestic Violence clause during the Los Angeles riots.

The Constitution does not distinguish between an invasion that lands on a beach and one that walks through an open door in Sacramento — and until the Federal Government treats California's ballot box with the same urgency as its border, it has secured neither.

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