Joined by a handful of advisers and about 75 business delegates, Gov. Jerry Brown flew to China on Monday to pitch California's business opportunities and to open a trade and investment office in Shanghai during his visit.

Brown spent three years planning the visit. The week-long trade and investment mission includes lunches, forums and signings of government-government agreements in Beijing, Nanjing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.

Those cities are among the most developed in China. Shanghai is China's industrial and financial hub, while Guangzhou, ideally situated in the heartland of the Pearl River Delta region, is home to some of China's countless manufacturers.

On April 9th, Brown met with China’s Minister of Commerce Gao Hucheng and signed a landmark agreement to bolster bilateral economic ties with the Ministry of Commerce, the first-of-its-kind with a subnational entity.

Analysts told The Sacramento Bee that the state government’s focus has shifted from exports promotion to investment attraction. They predicted that the state has the potential to attract $10 billion to $60 billion in direct investment from China by 2020.However, skepticism remains.

Although the China office Brown will open in Shanghai will be financed by private donations, experts told Sacramento Bee that it is not without financial risk considering the staff’s salary and time involved.

According to Los Angeles Times, Brown's trade mission intersects with one of the most controversial issues of his tenure: the state's $68 billion bullet train. He hopes that China, an emerging source of foreign direct investment to United States, can pump cash into the troubled project. 

People’s Daily, the state-run newspaper in China, said Brown, together with California rail board chief Dan Richard and representatives with California-based railroad companies, spoke highly of China’s 5,000-mile complex of high-speed rail when riding China’s sleek bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai.

However, some micro bloggers on Weibo, China’s twitter-like platform, said California’s high-speed railway project is a hot potato which could get China’s railway companies deeper into debt. 

“United States is broke, it even needs to borrow money from China to build their railways, and now they are smiling,  approaching to you – China  (because they need money out of your pocket), to clear up their financial mess,” One micro blogger satirized.

Reach reporter Zhao Chen here.