A day after accusing Beijing of providing support to malicious hackers, the US has forcibly closed China’s Houston consulate, a move Foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called an “unprecedented escalation”.
China has 72 hours to close the facility. The State department says the move to effectively boot the Chinese from America’s fourth largest city was necessary “to protect American intellectual property and Americans’ private information”.
Donald Trump, Beijing says, needs to “revoke this erroneous decision” posthaste, or risk “firm countermeasures”.
This is a potentially serious escalation, and it comes on a day when China leveled a bevy of accusations against the US, which Beijing claims has recently made a habit of harassing diplomats, bullying students, and confiscating electronic devices. In addition, China said its diplomatic missions have received bomb threats.
“For some time, the United States government has been shifting the blame to China with stigmatization and unwarranted attacks against China’s social system, harassing Chinese diplomatic and consular staff in America, intimidating and interrogating Chinese students and confiscating their personal electrical devices, even detaining them without cause”, Wang charged.
On Tuesday evening, fire trucks were dispatched to the Houston consulate, where local media said trash cans full of documents were ablaze in a courtyard.
.@HoustonFire and @houstonpolice are responding to reports of documents being burned at the Consulate General of China on 3417 Montrose Boulevard. Here's what the scene looks like there right now. pic.twitter.com/grUHhqmUz4
— KPRC2Tulsi (@KPRC2Tulsi) July 22, 2020
“It appears to be open burning in a container. It does not appear to be an unconfined fire but we have not been allowed access”, Houston fire department chief Samuel Pena told a local ABC affiliate. “We are standing by and monitoring”, he added.
“You could just smell the paper burning”, one witness told KPRC 2. “But, all the firefighters were just surrounding the building. They couldn’t go inside”.
BREAKING — US abruptly ordered the closure of Chinese Consulate in Houston on July 21, China announces.
Chinese staff in Houston is videotaped of burning classified documents https://t.co/yhh54n8LjC
— Rag?p Soylu (@ragipsoylu) July 22, 2020
FOX 26 said consulate staff told local police they were destroying documents because they are being evicted on Friday.
China operates consulates in five other cities: Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
Hu Xijin, Xi’s media man and the editor with The Global Times, called the move “a manifestation of panic”, in a Weibo post. “It seems that Washington has no bottom line”, he added.
The news sparked a global risk-off move, with havens bid, US equity futures lower and the yuan moving back through a 7.00 handle. Treasury and bund curves bull flattened, the periphery widened, European shares dipped, and the dollar lurched higher, sending crude to the lows. Most of the moves were eventually faded.
“Just when things seemed to be meandering along smoothly with investors and traders alike looking to take a bit of a breather, USDCNH is back above 7 and drawing the whole risk market along for the ride”, AxiCorp’s Stephen Innes said. “Hopefully, this is little more than something lost in translation, and US-China tensions remain at the pillow fight level”.
Yes, hopefully. But it sounds as though State has conjured a IP-related reason to force China out of Houston. This is just another manifestation of “Cold War 2.0”. Remember: it’s not just about trade. And maybe it never was. This is a full-blown culture clash, and the main front is tech and IP.
Underscoring the point, State’s Morgan Ortagus said, “The United States will not tolerate the PRC’s violations of our sovereignty and intimidation of our people, just as we have not tolerated the PRC’s unfair trade practices, theft of American jobs, and other egregious behavior”.
China is now considering closing the US consulate in Wuhan in response, according to Reuters. I suppose that will rule out any fact-finding missions to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Read more: ‘Cold War 2.0’ Isn’t Going To End. No Matter Who Is President
Congress should pass a law making it illegal for US universities, people and institutions to take money from Chinese in exchange for technology, medical and other research and intellectual property without a public authorization.
This is not a one way street- shame on those in US who are paid/funded by USA who then sell to China for personal gain. .
It’s amazing that racism has made it here to this blog
Sadly, I have to agree with you. Not long ago (2003) I worked for a F500 tech company in an advanced research organization. At that time the company started a major Chinese operations expansion.
The majority of our open requisitions were for China based employees.
There were several reasons that we were given: a) the per head cost was less than 1/2 compared to US, b) everybody else was doing it, c) the China sales volume was larger than the rest of the world combined, We are paying the price now. And BTW, DARPA/DoD/DoE projects generated IP that was eventually shared with Chinese staff. Sensitive technology export licenses worked out “great”. Greed & fear!
Using this as an excuse for failure just cause you more failure. There is a thing called hardworking, dude. A Huawei engineer works over 50 weeks a year, 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, for YEARS.
Curious – why Houston?
Then, “the United States government has been…… intimidating and interrogating Chinese students and confiscating their personal electrical devices, even detaining them without cause”, Wang charged.”
Heck Mr Wang, the US government is now doing that to its own citizens. We even get rifles pointed at us.
See Portland and soon Chicago
So-called Qian Lu Ji Qiong – to exhaust one’s limited abilities (idiom).