BYD — "Build Your Dreams" — is a Chinese electric vehicle and battery giant headquartered in Shenzhen. The company operates a California subsidiary in Lancaster that employs roughly 1,000 people.

Our reporting exposed a web of influential players tied to the unusual mask contract, with connections reaching directly into Governor Newsom’s inner circle.

The prominent lobbyist representing BYD is Mark Weideman of The Weideman Group. Newsom’s campaign received $40,000 in contributions from BYD’s automotive division.

Weideman also lobbies for Bloom Energy, a San Jose fuel-cell manufacturer that retooled its operations to refurbish ventilators during the pandemic. He additionally represents NextGen America, owned by Tom Steyer — the same Tom Steyer who chaired Newsom’s economic recovery committee after his own failed presidential bid.

When the Globe contacted Weideman for comment, neither a phone call to his office on May 19, 2020, at 1:07 p.m., nor a follow-up email sent on May 25 received any response.

Adding another layer of insider access: Weideman’s wife, Jennifer Wada, runs her own government relations firm, Wada Government Relations Group. Few Sacramento insiders realize the two are married. Wada previously partnered in the law firm Wada Williams Law Group with Anthony Williams — the same Anthony Williams who now serves as Gov. Newsom’s Legislative Affairs Secretary and was once described in news reports as the governor’s "chief lobbyist."

"Ke Li — a Chinese national who serves as BYD’s executive vice president and is reportedly married to the company’s billionaire founder and CEO, Wang Chuanfu, a Chinese Communist Party member and close ally of Xi Jinping — donated $20,000 to Newsom’s 2018 gubernatorial campaign and another $30,000 to his 2022 reelection bid."

In 2005, the mayor of San Francisco paid a visit to Shanghai, where he worked out some agreements that furthered city-to-city cooperation. Mayor Gavin Newsom was at the beginning of a career that married environmental alarmism to close cooperation with the Chinese state. The memorandum he signed with Shanghai Mayor Han Zheng brought Chinese police officers, attorneys, and judges to the Fog City. Newsom in turn brought bottles of PlumpJack from his Napa Valley winery.

My organization, the National Association of Scholars (NAS), has spent a year attempting to trace the connections, the political favors, and the interweaving of Chinese state interests with California’s political establishment. We don’t have subpoena power or deep connections to the regime. We are, instead, specialists in higher education, so we naturally learned more about that side of the picture than anything else. But the political side was unavoidable.

My assessment: California’s energy policy is made in China, and California is in many respects a vassal of China. Best of all, from China’s perspective, few Californians realize it. They live in a dream world where high-price energy is just the cost they pay for a really clean environment. NAS’s report, Behind the Climate Curtain: China’s Hidden Role in California’s Energy Mandates and University Partnerships, presents our evidence to back these audacious claims. I can’t say we have the kind of proof that will lead to future perp-walks of politicians by the FBI. But we have wind farms, solar plantations, and tankers full of the kinds of details that investigators might want to examine.