As bad as you think the level of Chicom influence in California is, it’s actually worse.

Fiona Ma, California’s state treasurer and a candidate for lieutenant governor, has ties to a private Chinese boarding school at the center of a scathing California county audit, according to a post that was on the school’s website.

Ma told students during a 2023 visit to the school that she could help provide internships and job opportunities in California, the post said.

Pegasus California School, based in Qingdao, China, was the subject of an audit issued last month by education officials in California’s Riverside County. The report found a Southern California district improperly issued diplomas to the school’s students and identified potential fraud and other illegal practices. Reporting by the Axel Springer Global Reporters Network shows she visited the school, met with Chinese officials, and was featured in its marketing. The school’s founder also donated to Ma’s campaigns.

The California Department of Education sent a cease-and-desist letter to Pegasus last month demanding that it stop claiming it was founded with the agency’s support. “You are on notice that the California Department of Education is not connected to, does not approve and does not endorse Pegasus California School,” the letter said.

California officials however do. And this is not the first time it’s happened.

An Insider investigation has found that some of California’s highest-ranking education officials and leading public universities worked closely with a businessman named Steven Ma to help set up an exclusive private boarding school in Qingdao, China, called Pegasus California School. The school, which cost roughly $34,ooo per year, purported to be a replica of a public high school in California, and was nominally a part of the Val Verde Unified School District in Riverside County, California.

California’s former top education official and a former state secretary of education were involved in the effort, as were senior Val Verde officials and a retired senior staffer within the University of California Office of the President, the headquarters of the UC system, who continued to work as as a contractor for the University of California at Irvine even as Pegasus was paying him to help its students gain admission.

Val Verde’s superintendent publicly proclaimed that UC Riverside guaranteed admission to all Pegasus graduates, according to the minutes of a public-school board meeting. One former California education official described the arrangement, if it exists, as “appalling.”

How exactly is a school in China part of a California school district?

Even though it was a part of an American public-school district, tuition and fees at Pegasus added up to more than $34,000 a year. And even though it was largely staffed by Val Verde teachers and administrators, it was actually a boarding school. And even though it conferred a Val Verde diploma to graduates, Pegasus California School was really a private academy exclusively serving Chinese students in Qingdao, China, a city of more than 9 million bordering the Yellow Sea, some 6,300 miles from Val Verde.

How much of California is being run out of China anyway?