A member of California governor Gavin Newsom’s cabinet posed for a group photo with Xi Jinping on Friday during a conference in Beijing organized by a group that the intelligence community says is behind Chinese Communist Party influence work in America.
Xi posed for a group photo when he made an appearance at the China International Friendship Conference, involving a select group of political and civil-society figures from several countries. California secretary of government operations Amy Tong appeared in the last row of the picture next to David Haubert, a supervisor of Alameda County, Calif.
The photograph was disseminated on Friday across Chinese Communist Party propaganda outlets calibrated for international audiences and the accounts they control on social media.
The California government operations agency confirmed in a statement to National Review that Tong made the trip to China: “Secretary Tong is in China building on the state’s significant and longstanding efforts across administrations to strengthen subnational partnerships that benefit Californians.”
The agency also said it coordinated with the State Department in advance of the trip on security and diplomatic protocols.
Newsom appointed Tong, a longtime veteran of roles across California’s state government, in 2022. Among her responsibilities is to lead the state’s adoption of artificial-intelligence technology.
The organization behind the conference that Tong attended is the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a self-styled independent nongovernmental group dedicated to telling foreigners about China. But U.S. intelligence officials allege that CPAFFC in fact operates the party’s influence operations targeting state and local officials across America.
In a 2022 bulletin, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence characterized CPAFFC as one of “many quasi-official entities or proxies involved in united front work and foreign influence operations whose ties to the CCP or PRC government may be hidden or not readily apparent.” It cited the association’s efforts to set up “sister-city partnerships” with U.S. participants. The ODNI also accused CPAFFC of leveraging those arrangements to push Beijing’s political priorities on Taiwan and Tibet.
Despite those warnings, Newsom has forged ahead with a series of events directly involving CPAFFC and Chinese Communist Party officials. Tong’s appearance in Beijing follows a year of breakneck diplomacy by Newsom focused on cultivating close diplomatic ties with CPAFFC and the Chinese government.
During a nine-day trip to China last year, Newsom received a 45-minute audience with the Chinese general secretary, during which he declined to raise sensitive issues in the U.S.–China bilateral relationship, claiming that the State Department urged him to do so instead with lower-ranking officials. He also met Yang Wanming, CPAFFC’s president, during the October 2023 trip.
Then in May, Newsom hosted a conference involving the group in California focused on developing closer ties between his state and China’s Guangdong province.
Tong’s team told National Review that her trip last week followed up on the conference this summer. “Following the Bay-to-Bay Dialogue in spring 2024, this trip focuses on uplifting longstanding cultural ties, boosting economic opportunities for California, and continuing climate change cooperation.”
In July, Tong represented Newsom at a conference in Tacoma, Wash., co-hosted by CPAFFC in tandem with the U.S. nonprofit Sister Cities International. She delivered a speech to the event, in which she conveyed greetings from Newsom and expressed support for deepening California-China exchanges. She had attended the previous U.S.–China sister-cities summit, also organized by CPAFFC, last November in Suzhou, China.
CPAFFC denies that it is part of China’s united-front influence efforts, with the association’s secretary general Shen Xin asserting in a brief interview at the Tacoma conference that “it has nothing to do with us.”