Its influence is felt in many areas but none more importantly than climate science. This might seem odd in light of China’s minimal domestic investment in fighting “climate change.” But China sees climate hysteria as a lever to weaken the West by diverting resources away from more productive investments. The more America pursues efforts to ameliorate the supposed dangers of climate change, the less China has to concern itself with Western power.
To this end, Tsinghua University has actively promoted climate alarmism in American higher education.
But this is not to say that Tsinghua’s efforts in America are limited to fomenting anxieties about the climate; Tsinghua is deeply enmeshed in China’s military-industrial base. It has been linked to cyberattacks against American companies and the state of Alaska. It developed technology that is used in human rights violations in Xinjiang. And it is known for obtaining technologies abroad for integration into Beijing’s efforts of civil-military fusion.
Since 2012, Tsinghua has been overseen by China’s own State Administration for Science, Technology, Industry, and National Defense. This allows the university to assist Beijing in developing weapons programs, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology. Tsinghua is also the center of China’s efforts to guide climate change policy abroad through agreements with elite universities in the United States and elsewhere through subnational diplomacy and memoranda of understanding (MOUs).
In 2019, Tsinghua took over the field of climate change studies by storm. In California, Tsinghua partnered with the University of California, Berkeley, to form the California-China Climate Institute (CCI). The CCI then became the point of contact for a bilateral agreement between China’s own Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the state of California.
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Under the agreement, California, which often posits itself as a leader in climate policy, partners with China—the world’s largest emitter of pollution—to collaborate in forcing the adoption of “zero emission” (“New Energy”) vehicles. Tsinghua’s work has been enshrined in California state law.
In 2021, California Assembly Bill 39 established the CCI under the auspices of the University of California system. While Tsinghua sits on the Chinese side of the Beijing-Sacramento partnership, China helps lead the California side as well. Legal Planet reported in 2019 that the “co-chair of CCCI’s academic advisory board,” was none other than the former senior attorney of Beijing-based Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Alex Wang. The NRDC has been suspected of acting as an agent of the Chinese government.
The CCI brokered subnational diplomacy between Xi Jinping and California Governor Gavin Newsom. In 2023, the CCI facilitated the “Declaration of Enhanced Subnational Climate Action and Cooperation Between the State of California and the People’s Republic of China.” Despite Article I, Section 10 of the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition of states from entering into agreements with foreign powers, Tsinghua successfully ensnared California’s government into a climate and energy treaty by another name.
In California, Tsinghua has been involved in research cited by the California Air Resources Board (CARB) to justify its regulatory stance on gas-powered cars and emissions standards. One Tsinghua alumnus worked with UC Irvine to conduct research for CARB on the health effects of wildfire smoke. Last year, CARB worked with another Tsinghua alumnus named Yifang Zhu at the UCLA Department of Environmental Health Sciences to conduct a study titled “Residential Appliances in Diverse California Communities: Emission, Exposure, and Health Impacts of Toxic Air Contaminants (RESPECT)” that examined environmental risks from household appliances. Studies like this help justify a broader California plan to reach “zero emission” standards by 2045.
Following Gavin Newsom’s 2023 trip to China to discuss climate collaboration, former CARB chair Mary Nichols noted that CARB “is going to be examining the data that is submitted by companies that are subject to our statures, and the Chinese are going to be very interested in following what California is doing—as they always are.”
Also in 2019, Tsinghua took the lead in founding the Global Alliance of Universities on Climate (GAUC). Tsinghua summoned twelve of the world’s top universities to Beijing in late May of that year to establish GAUC and collaborate on advancing climate change policy, as well as to “mobilize more climate change action.” On the surface, the GAUC appears to be an international consortium of concerned universities working as equals. But the organization’s structure shows that China is in charge. GAUC’s board of directors is headed by the president of Tsinghua, while its secretariat is currently entirely Chinese.
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GAUC’s leadership is comprised of presidents from some of the most elite universities on the world. Columbia University’s Katrina Armstrong, who served as Columbia’s president from August 2024 to March 2025, serves on GAUC’s board alongside Maurie McInnis, the president of Yale University, and UC Berkeley’s own Chancellor, Rich Lyons. Also included on the board is the president of the London School of Economics, the president of the Australian National University, the president of the Imperial College London, the president of Italy’s Sciences Po, the president of the University of Tokyo, and representatives from Oxford and Cambridge. If elite universities seem in lockstep in promoting specific climate policies, it is because of organizations like GAUC.
Aside from UC Berkeley’s special relationship with China, Yale, Columbia, and other American universities all have close bilateral climate ties with Tsinghua. Yale and Tsinghua offer a joint master’s degree program focused on environmental studies. Columbia offers a joint program in Environmental Health Sciences with Tsinghua, which is devoted to “climate change, air pollution and human health.” Berkeley and Tsinghua, of course, have their own joint master’s program in “Energy and Climate Change.” Not to be left out, Harvard University has its partnerships with Tsinghua through the Harvard Belfer Center focused on “low carbon development,” fellowships on “Sustainability Science,” and workshops on “Subnational Climate Change Policy.” Harvard and Tsinghua have their own MOU through their schools of public health.
China is not only the world’s foremost polluter, but Beijing continues to build coal-fired power plants at a rate of two per week, outpacing the entirety of the rest of the world over the past two years. China’s adoption of coal while partnering with foreign universities to promote “net zero” emissions combines method with madness. The “green” energy technology that net-zero policies promote relies on rare earth minerals that are heavily produced with child slave-labor in Africa. China not only controls most of the world’s supply of critical minerals but also oversees the slave labor involved in their mining. Recently, China has announced export curbs on those very same minerals after the election of Donald Trump.
Elite American colleges and universities are not openly partnering with Beijing to the detriment of national security, but are complicit in collaborating with a totalitarian government seeking to control the technology and economy of tomorrow. China unabashedly uses “climate change” for its own national interest, and promotes climate policy through its partners in Western higher education at the expense of American energy independence. For top universities with programs devoted to “climate science,” China’s Tsinghua is a puppet master promoting a narrative through peer review.
https://www.mindingthecampus.org/2025/04/23/how-china-took-over-university-climate-science-to-weaken-america/
Image: “Gov. Newsom met with President Xi Jinping and other high-level Chinese officials on Oct. 25, 2023” by California Governor on Flickr
