Brown called Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s decision to cancel his trip to China following the balloon affair “a mistake if you want to have communication,” and minimized the incursion over American airspace.The former governor doesn’t necessarily think Biden should visit China, but he favorably invoked how former President Barack Obama met with Xi Jinping at Sunnylands, the Annenberg estate near Palm Springs, in 2013. (Brown himself also met with Xi on that trip and subsequently in Beijing, making him one of the few governors to have such high-level contact)The closest Brown will come to criticizing Beijing’s autocracy, human rights abuses or any of its other transgressions is to acknowledge that “there are things in China we find horrendous.” But in the next breath, he says “not everything we have done has been perfect, so we ought to have a little humility.”

As world leaders gathered Monday for a United Nations summit on global warming, former Gov. Jerry Brown and China’s top climate official formally launched a California-China Climate Institute to research ways to combat climate change.Brown, who was to speak by phone from California, announced the initiative with China’s Special Representative for Climate Change Affairs Xie Zhenhua in New York, where officials from 60 countries were convened for a United Nations Climate Action Summit in advance of the U.N. General Assembly.

In May 2021, the Institute held a high-level dialogue on subnational climate neutrality pathways for the U.S. and China, featuring senior climate leaders and governors and mayors from subnational jurisdictions in the U.S. and China.In November 2020, the Institute held a joint dialogue with Guangdong Province, organized in collaboration with The China Institute for Innovation & Development Strategy (CIIDS) on opportunities for subnational cooperation between the two nations.In April 2020, The California-China Climate Institute (CCCI), working in collaboration with the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries (CPAFFC) organized a dialogue on climate and the COVID-19 pandemic.