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WASHINGTON: The United States said Thursday (Sept. 3) that it would require senior Chinese diplomats to obtain State Department approval before visiting U.S. college campuses or holding cultural events with more than 50 people off the grounds. of the mission.
Washington projected the move as a response to Beijing’s restrictions on US diplomats in China. It comes as part of a campaign by the Trump administration against alleged Chinese influence operations and espionage.
The State Department said it will also take steps to help ensure that all social media accounts for the Chinese embassy and consulate are “properly identified.”
“We are simply demanding reciprocity,” US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told a news conference. “The access of our diplomats in China should reflect the access that Chinese diplomats have in the United States, and today’s steps will take us substantially in that direction.”
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It was the latest step by the United States to curb Chinese activity in the United States in the run-up to the November presidential elections, in which President Donald Trump has made a tough approach to China a key foreign policy platform.
The Chinese embassy in Washington called the move “another unjustified restriction and barrier to Chinese diplomatic and consular personnel” that “goes against the US side’s self-proclaimed values of openness and freedom.”
Pompeo also said that the State Department had recently written to the boards of directors of US universities alerting them to threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party.
“These threats can come in the form of illicit research funding, theft of intellectual property, intimidation of foreign students, and opaque talent recruitment efforts,” Pompeo said.
He said universities could help ensure they had clean investments and endowment funds by revealing Chinese firms on such funds and eliminating those related to human rights abuses.
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On Tuesday, Pompeo said he expected the dozens of the Confucius Institute’s cultural centers funded by the Chinese government on US campuses, which he accused of working to recruit “spies and collaborators,” would be closed by the end of the year.
On Wednesday, the United States Center of the Washington-based Confucius Institute, which last month was forced to register as a foreign mission after Pompeo accused it of promoting Beijing’s “evil influence,” said the State Department said so. it had been wrongly described as the headquarters of the Confucius Institutes. .
“Contrary to what people have heard from the State Department, CI programs in the US are independent of each other, set up and run by schools that choose to establish Chinese language education, and staffed hired and supervised by those schools, “he said in a statement.
READ: US Requires Confucius Institute Center to Register as Foreign Mission
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Pompeo said he plans to discuss China and other regional issues with the 10-nation Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other Indo-Pacific countries in virtual meetings next week.
The State Department said Pompeo would participate in a meeting of Foreign Ministers at the East Asia Summit and another with his ASEAN counterparts on September 9.
He said that on September 11 he would launch a cooperative partnership with the Mekong River partner countries Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam, with the aim of strengthening their autonomy, economic independence and sustainable development.
Also on that day, he will participate in a meeting of the ASEAN Regional Forum, a grouping of 27 nations that brings together ASEAN with dialogue partners from around the world.
Wednesday’s US move goes beyond one from last October that requires Chinese diplomats to notify meetings with state and local officials and at educational and research institutions.
The State Department has also required Chinese media outlets to register as foreign missions and announced in March that it was reducing the number of journalists authorized to work in the US offices of major Chinese media outlets from 160 to 100.
