‘Pull back from the brink’: Former Gov. Jerry Brown on China, homelessness and political polls

Former California Governor Jerry Brown sat down for an interview with Inside California Politics in mid-November on a number of topics ranging from the relationship with China to California’s homelessness problem.

Diplomatic ties with China

California recently hosted the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, a meeting of government leaders from countries across the Pacific Rim, which Brown, California’s 34th and 39th governor, said was beneficial.

“I don’t know if it’s a turning point but we’re at a better point than a few weeks or maybe a few months ago,” Brown said. “I really like the fact that President Xi said that the planet is big enough for both countries. That was before President Biden got to talk.”

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Brown noted that the two countries have a large role to play when it comes to the environment.

“The climate is deteriorating to our disadvantage…,” Brown said. “You can’t really solve that problem without China’s help. China is the major polluter. America is the historical major polluter. So the two countries, the major polluters, need to work together because they’re also the major creators of technology and we have the solutions.”

“So if we can pull together and work out or make less important some of our differences, the whole world would be better and we ourselves would avoid some really bad, bad outcomes,” Brown said.

Brown says rhetoric coming out of Washington, including criticism of Biden and Gov. Gavin Newsom over their diplomatic visits with Chinese leaders, pushes us closer to those bad outcomes.

“Newsom going at a time when people in Washington just vilify China— not to be saying that China doesn’t have a lot of faults— but if they keep raising the temperature and the antagonism, yes we will have a war,” Brown said.

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“So, while not trying to minimize other issues and bad things about China, the big bad is the war and the war doesn’t start one day,” Brown said. “It builds up over a series of mistakes and charges and attacks and misunderstandings. You’ve got to pull back from that, pull back from the brink. His critics, I think, are very, very shortsighted.”

Brown says that it’s not that China doesn’t have problems but that the U.S. needs to be a little more introspective about its own.

“There are serious issues [in China] with the Uyghurs and Taiwan and repression but America has— Xi can come out here and talk about the homeless dying in San Francisco at the greatest rate ever,” Brown said. “It’s a real disgrace…”

“The worst human rights violation would be a war with China that kills hundreds of millions of people,” Brown said.

Rather than focusing on competing world powers, Brown said America should focus more on itself.

“The key to America’s future is taking care of business right here,” Brown said. “Fixing up the inequality, fixing up the infrastructure, really dealing with climate change and, of course, fixing up public schools, which I can tell you because I’m very intimately acquainted with the charter schools, my own included, and public schools, we’ve got a long long way to go.”

“We have lots of issues that we can handle right here at home.”

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The burden on California’s teachers

When it comes to public education, the former governor said teachers need more money and less regulation.

“Teachers are getting burned out,” Brown said. “We’ve got more darn regulations coming out of Sacramento. What we really need to do is give the teachers the coaching they need and the money they need for the very tough job.”

“We’re asking a lot of teachers and I don’t think we’re paying them enough and we’re burdening them with too many rules,” Brown said. “And of course the leaders of the school, they’re the ones that really collapse under the regulatory regime. And Sacramento, that’s all it knows how to do, more laws, more rules.”

Homelessness

Brown says it’s on state Democrats, who control all three state branches, to deal with the state’s housing crisis.

“Democrats better look into their soul and figure out what more we can do to… get people shelter, get them out of their tents, get them out of the downtown and into an environment that makes sense,” Brown said.

Brown knows that even after figuring out what to do, implementing it won’t be easy.

“Now if you ask me how you do that, it’s expensive, it requires changes to the law and you’ll have people fighting you one way or the other from different sides,” Brown said. “It’s not good and I don’t think we should sugarcoat the fact that the homeless problem has gotten worse.”

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Political Polls

A new poll from the Berkeley Institute of Government Studies found that Gov. Newsom’s approval rating was near the lowest it’s been since the start of his tenure in office, around 44% with 49% disapproving.

The former governor said polls about governors are often reflective of economic concerns.

“The thing about polls is that when they’re talking about the governor, they’re talking about the economy,” Brown said. “When 60% of the people thought the state was going in the wrong direction, it was very hard to get over 50%. So the people do associate the governor with good or bad times.”

Brown says he thinks the governor is doing fine.

“I like the fact that he’s emphasizing climate, he went to China, and, yeah, you have to take care of all the other stuff,” Brown said. “He’s gotten people out of prison, criminal law reform, he’s doing something about mental health. That’s big stuff and no one else was doing that, so that’s good.”

“I think he’s doing a good job,” Brown said. “Would I do it differently? Probably so, because we all have our own ways.”

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