A senior aide to Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry spoke at an overseas meeting on addressing climate change alongside organizations closely linked to the Chinese Communist Party.
Reed Schuler, managing implementation director under Kerry at the State Department-housed office, took part in the little-known Dec. 8, 2023, meeting at the United Nations-run climate conference in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, according to the Energy Foundation, a CCP-tied nonprofit group with offices in the United States and Beijing that hosted the event. A top employee for the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a Beijing-based entity that U.S. intelligence has flagged as being a CCP front group, was also in attendance late last year, National Review reported.
“The front organizations like this are very useful to the Chinese government in conducting engagement or co-optation or exploitation, often of genuine NGOs in other countries or governments in other countries,” John Dotson, a China analyst and deputy director of the Global Taiwan Institute, told the outlet. “It’s useful for them as a sort of broader, more ongoing effort to continue the puppet show.”
News of the December 2023 meeting is a window into how the U.S., under President Joe Biden, has prioritized a sweeping green energy agenda that conservative critics often argue will only benefit China and other authoritarian rivals. The White House confirmed on Wednesday that Biden tapped senior climate adviser John Podesta to succeed Kerry as the special presidential envoy for climate, a role created by the government in 2021.
Congressional Republicans raised concerns this week over the appointment of Podesta due to his prior ties to CCP officials, Fox News reported. Podesta, who worked in both the Obama and Clinton administrations, participated in numerous calls between 2015 and 2016 with CCP official Tung Chee-hwa, whom Podesta called a friend in emails years back, according to unearthed documents.
The December 2023 climate meeting was called “China-US Track II Dialogue: Promoting the Implementation of the ‘Sunshine Land Statement’ (Provincial-State Cooperation and Other Issues),” according to the Energy Foundation. It centered on “the global low-carbon process” and ways in which the U.S. and China “can work together to advance multiple goals such as climate mitigation, air quality improvement, and economic development,” according to the nonprofit group.
At the meeting, an official from the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, Shen Xin, was one speaker, and another was Wei Fansi, the Energy Foundation’s vice president of strategic cooperation, according to reports.
Jonathan Pershing, ex-deputy climate envoy for the U.S. and now-director of environmental programs for the left-wing William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, also spoke at the meeting, according to the Energy Foundation. Pershing notably went to an October 2022 event supported by the China–U.S. Exchange Foundation, a nonprofit group in Hong Kong registered with the U.S. Justice Department as a foreign agent that counts its founder as Tung Chee-hwa.
“Communist China had never fulfilled its climate commitments,” Mary Kissel, an ex-senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo under former President Donald Trump, told National Review. “What objective does a track-two dialogue serve, other than allow Beijing more time to break its promises?”
Pompeo said in 2020 that the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries is one of many groups seeking to influence U.S. officials through the CCP’s “united front.”
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Questioned about the December 2023 meeting, a State Department spokesperson said it was to “share views with a range of U.S. and PRC participants present, and not to engage in particular with any one of the many organizations represented.”
“Conducting diplomacy in the PRC means we have to talk to the CCP in order to advance U.S. interests,” the spokesperson told National Review. “We believe it is better to engage so we know what organizations like CPAFFC are doing and who in the United States they are talking to.”
