PRC Dips in Houston…Get ’em out by Friday
News that staff at the People’s Republic of China’s consulate in Houston, Texas were burning documents in a courtyard on Tuesday night came as a surprise. Burning of papers is a signal of significant change in a diplomatic mission. As someone who has been responsible for securing classified government information in a U.S. diplomatic post abroad and drilled on that process regularly, the burning of documents typically signals impending closure of the post. Only days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, staff at Japan’s consulate in Honolulu were noticed by FBI agents watching it. Document burns are a strong diplomatic signal.
What we the public didn’t know yesterday is that the U.S. government had ordered the closure of the People’s Republic of China’s Houston consulate and the expulsion of its diplomatic staff as persona non grata (PNG — which can be a noun or a verb). State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus offered the diplomatic justification for the U.S. action. “The Vienna Convention states diplomats must ‘respect the laws and regulations of the receiving State’ and ‘have a duty not to interfere in the internal affairs of that State.’” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo commented on the ordered closure of the mission following an announcement.
We are setting out clear expectations as to how the Chinese Communist Party is going to behave…And when they don’t, we are going to take actions that protect the American people, protect our security, our national security, and also protect our economy and jobs.
But are there good reasons to close a Chinese consulate? Consider my friend Gabe Collins’s points, which add up to a strong, “probably not.”
Shutting down PRC diplomatic facilities like the #Houston consulate is not a productive path. What is the strategic objective we are trying to accomplish by doing this? U.S. needs to be in the #economicstatecraft and competition business vis-a-vis #China, not the shutdown and eviction business.
As someone who is banned from entering China thanks to my work identifying government censorship there a decade ago among other things, there’s a lot I don’t like about China’s behavior. Setting aside that the Xi Jinping’s government has imprisoned at least a million of its Uighur minority (who are observant of Islam), there are issues with China on trade, intellectual property theft, coercion of Chinese nationals living outside their home country, and the revocation of press and speech freedoms in Hong Kong. China is a totalitarian dictatorship that is growing increasingly, not less totalitarian.
And then there is what China does in cyberspace. My colleagues at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab identified Chinese efforts to subvert the Dalai Lama organization more than a decade ago (and now chronicles similar behavior undertaken by countries around the globe today). Since then, China has compromised or breached computer systems of multiple foreign governments, international sports organizations including the World Anti-Doping Agency (in advance of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games), and hundreds of U.S. corporations in what several American officials have identified as the, “greatest theft of intellectual property in history.” Just to keep tabs on adherents to its Falun Gong religion, the PRC hacked Google’s Gmail service in 2011.
In the face of persistent Chinese cyber-espionage, Barack Obama raised the issue with Xi during at 2013 summit in California. Of course as that summit progressed, news stories regarding the defection of a National Security Agency contractor, Edward Snowden, to Hong Kong, largely overshadowed coverage of the Obama-Xi talks. President Trump has also made frequent noises about Chinese cyber-espionage and other allegations of unfair play by Beijing. Such allegations are true and the behavior continues. But closing the Chinese consulate in Houston was not a good idea.
A question for the moment is whether the closure of the consulate is a harbinger of a formal break in diplomatic relations between the U.S. and China. We should hope not for a number of reasons. Disentangling U.S.-China exchanges in goods, services, and capital would represent another potentially wrenching blow to the American economy. Escalating a crisis between our two countries is unnecessary right now. Instead, we need to be focused on Chinese espionage and other activities and should find countermeasures to them. For instance, should we continue to block Huawei’s moves to build 5G telecommunication infrastructure here? As someone who was offered a bribe by Huawei representatives in return for my silence, my answer is an emphatic “Yes! Block them.” Beyond on 5G, there is much we can do economically and diplomatically to signal our displeasure with the PRC. What concerns me is that China has become a political focus of the Trump Administration in a maneuver to designed to characterize presumptive Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden as a pawn of Xi Jinping.
With the Trump 2020 re-election campaign now characterizing Joe Biden as “Corrupt China Joe,” we have entered an ugly new phase in our national politics. Messaging from the Right is now coalescing around a narrative of massive Chinese influence operations driving all opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency. What does that mean? It’s simple. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton? Communists. Portland demonstrators? Communists. Black Lives Matter? Communists. Socialists? Communists. And on and on.
Painting all opposition to the Trump administration as pro-China is, of course, ridiculous. U.S.-Chinese relations have been sliding for more than 20 years. Remember when a U.S. Air Force B-2 bomber dropped multiple precision guided weapons on China’s embassy to Serbia in 1999 or the collision of a U.S. Navy EP-3 signals intelligence plane and a PLAAF fighter in 2001? The relationship between our countries has been headed in the wrong direction for a long time, and much of the deterioration in those relations can be blamed on Beijing.
So allow me to make this clear. I am staunchly opposed to China’s subjugation and imprisonment of political dissidents as well as the Uighur and Tibetan minorities living there. I also oppose Chinese cyber-espionage units’ unending theft of intellectual property created by American companies. The outright stealing of U.S. proprietary information (including information regarding vaccines and treatments for SARS-CoV-2) by Chinese spies is wrong as well. I am disgusted by the wholesale censorship of online media in China by its Great Firewall and activities beyond it. The suppression of information regarding Covid-19 was a gross breach in international protocols regarding public health. I firmly believe that China has massively underreported the number of Covid-19 cases for months. Finally, China’s intimidation of its neighbors, jailing of foreign visitors for political purposes, and economic chicanery perpetrated against developing nations are all wrong, wrong, wrong.
But I cannot, and will not accept a return to McCarthyite anti-communism here in our country as a sideshow to cover for the failings of our nation in dealing with SARS-CoV-2, race relations, or any other problem it faces. Those who disagree with President Trump may believe in socialism, progressivism, or even increased taxes on the wealthy, but they are not agents of Chinese communism. Nor am I. Of course, I also don’t believe the Chinese are communists. I think they are totalitarian late capitalists. Totalitarian is a word I never wish to describe our own political-economic system. I refuse to accept the President’s labeling of his political rival as “Corrupt China Joe.” It’s racist, jingoistic, and it embraces every injustice perpetrated by Asian-Americans by our country. Reject it.
Courage.