California Treasurer Fiona Ma has met with high-ranking Chinese Communist Party officials and intelligence personnel at least 30 times over the past several decades, both in the United States and in China, a Daily Caller News Foundation investigation reported. The findings, drawn from translated Chinese government announcements and state media reports, describe a pattern stretching back to 1999, one that national security experts say should alarm federal intelligence agencies.
Ma is California's two-term treasurer and its chief financial officer. She is also the Democratic frontrunner in the state's 2026 lieutenant governor race. Her office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the DCNF.
The scope of the reported interactions goes well beyond the kind of routine trade-delegation handshakes that state officials sometimes accumulate. The DCNF's translations describe Ma introducing American lawmakers to Chinese intelligence officials, organizing trips for U.S. legislators to meet CCP-connected personnel, and personally awarding commendations to CCP members and operatives tied to Beijing's influence apparatus, at least 10 times since 2018.
The DCNF reported that Ma began taking U.S. lawmakers to China in 1999 while working as an aide for the late California Democratic Sen. John Burton, citing a China Daily report. She became a public servant in her own right in 2002. By December 2014, the DCNF found, Ma introduced more than 20 California State Legislature members to Chinese government and United Front Work Department officials during a trade delegation to Sichuan province.
The United Front Work Department is no ordinary diplomatic bureau. A memo from the House Select Committee on the CCP described its operations as a "blend of engagement, influence activities, and intelligence operations" that Beijing uses to steer foreign policy and "gain access to advanced foreign technology."
Since her inauguration as treasurer in January 2019, Ma has met with Chinese government and CCP intelligence officials more than 20 times, the DCNF reported. Three of those meetings took place in China in 2023. That same year, she sat for an interview with CGTN, a state-run Chinese media outlet.
The pattern is not limited to California. Recent federal prosecutions have exposed a broader web of CCP-linked covert operations inside the United States, from secret police stations in New York City to influence campaigns targeting state and local officials.
Among the most striking details: Ma personally awarded CCP members and Chinese intelligence officials with commendations on behalf of her office at least 10 times since 2018, the DCNF reported. In February 2023, she presented one such award to the chairman of the Chinese People's Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries during his visit to the United States.
That organization, known as CPAFFC, is not a benign cultural exchange group. The U.S. National Counterintelligence and Security Center has warned that CPAFFC "sought to directly and malignly influence state and local leaders to promote [China's] global agenda." The House Select Committee on the CCP has identified it as an affiliate of the United Front Work Department.
Ma was not the only California official to meet with CPAFFC's leadership. The Washington Examiner reported that Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass also met with CPAFFC president Lin Songtian between February 13 and 15, 2023, during his U.S. tour, just days after the Office of the Director of National Intelligence warned that Beijing was "redoubling its efforts to build influence at the state and local level to shift U.S. policy in China's favor." Victoria Coates, a Trump administration official, told the Examiner: "It's a real problem. It's a blatant attempt to influence policies."
The Trump administration had already withdrawn from a U.S.-China local partnership in 2020 over the group's alleged efforts to "directly and malignly influence" American institutions. Yet California officials kept the door open.
Peter Schweizer, the New York Times bestselling author of "Red Handed," told the DCNF the findings fit a familiar pattern of what he calls Beijing's strategy for cultivating American officials.
"CCP elite capture is alive and well. Any politician who continues to engage in these types of behavior is not a target, but is complicit in CCP activities. Ignorance is no longer an excuse."
Former U.S. Ambassador Joseph Cella was equally direct. He told the DCNF that the frequency of Ma's reported meetings with Chinese government and CCP intelligence officials should be a "flashing red light for our national security and intelligence agencies."
Cella went further, calling for systemic education across every level of government. He told the DCNF:
"[E]lected and appointed officials, staff, and executive leaders and workers in all sector and strata, need to be educated about the nature of the CCP, how these threats emanate and manifest, how to be on guard against them, and to counter them, the importance of refusing to participate in these meetings, and certainly reporting them to the FBI."
Whether Ma ever disclosed or reported any of her meetings to U.S. authorities remains unknown. The DCNF's reporting does not address that question, and Ma's office offered no response.
Ma has not hidden her enthusiasm for deeper ties with Beijing. In her 2023 interview with CGTN, she offered a vision of integration that reads differently in light of the DCNF's findings.
"We really should be more integrated. The more that we can get along, work together, I think would create more peace in the world as well as better economic opportunities for both countries."
Integration is a fine word when applied to legitimate trade. It takes on a different weight when the partner on the other side of the table runs an intelligence and influence operation that the U.S. government has formally warned about.
California has not been short on controversies involving its politicians and Chinese intelligence. Rep. Eric Swalwell's entanglement with a suspected Chinese spy made national headlines and raised hard questions about how easily Beijing gains proximity to American officeholders.
A separate thread in the DCNF's reporting ties Ma to a school with its own set of problems. Politico reported in April that Ma offered in September 2023 to help secure U.S. internships and employment opportunities for students attending Pegasus California School, which was founded in the coastal city of Qingdao by Ma's campaign finance committee chair.
A 2026 audit by the Riverside County Office of Education found that Pegasus students, who are Chinese nationals, "have allegedly received unlawful California high school diplomas through a partnership with the Val Verde Unified School District." The audit did not accuse Ma of wrongdoing. But the connection between Ma, her campaign finance chair's school, and a program under investigation for issuing questionable diplomas to foreign nationals adds another layer to an already dense picture.
The broader pattern of CCP-linked influence networks operating inside American institutions is no longer theoretical. Federal agencies, congressional committees, and national security experts have documented it in detail.
The DCNF's reporting also surfaced two earlier episodes that suggest Ma's deference to Beijing is not new. In August 2005, while serving on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, Ma allegedly withdrew her support for an art exhibit organized by practitioners of Falun Gong, the spiritual movement the CCP banned in 1999, after the Chinese government pressured her, The San Francisco Chronicle reported at the time.
Four years later, in March 2009, Ma allegedly killed a resolution honoring Tibet while serving as a California State Assemblywoman, following intense Chinese government lobbying, The Sacramento Bee reported.
Taken together, these episodes describe an elected official who did not simply attend meetings with CCP-connected figures but, on at least two occasions, reportedly altered her official conduct in response to Beijing's preferences. That is a qualitatively different kind of engagement than showing up at a trade dinner.
Some California Democrats have shown a willingness to distance themselves from colleagues when political liabilities become too heavy. Whether Ma's reported record with CCP officials triggers a similar reckoning in Sacramento remains to be seen.
The open questions here are serious. Which specific Chinese officials sat across from Ma in those 30-plus meetings? What exactly did the commendations she awarded say? Did she ever report these contacts to federal authorities? Did anyone in California's government raise concerns along the way?
None of those questions have public answers. Ma's silence, her office did not respond to the DCNF's multiple requests for comment, does nothing to fill the gap.
California's treasurer manages billions in public funds. She oversees bond sales, tax-advantaged savings programs, and the state's enormous investment portfolio. That is exactly the kind of access Beijing's influence apparatus is designed to cultivate, according to the very agencies charged with protecting the country from it.
And Ma is now running for lieutenant governor, a position that would place her one step from the governor's office.
When a state's chief financial officer has met with CCP and United Front operatives at least 30 times, awarded commendations to intelligence-linked officials, and refused to answer questions about any of it, voters deserve more than silence. They deserve a full accounting, and they deserve it before the next election, not after.
At some point, "building bridges" stops being a defense and starts being a pattern. Californians ought to ask which side of that line their treasurer has been standing on.
