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By PHELIM KINE
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Hi, China Watchers. Today we look at GOP criticism of the U.S. easing of its travel advisory for China, examine a congressional cage fight over Covid origins and consider how Elon Musk's China ties may influence President-elect Donald Trump's Beijing policy. And we profile a book that argues that imprisoned Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Jimmy Lai's combination of media, money and principles put him "in direct confrontation with Xi Jinping."
Let's get to it. — Phelim.
It "jeopardizes American lives" — lawmakers bash decision on China travel guidance
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Some GOP lawmakers want the State Department to reverse its decision to downgrade its travel warning for China last week.
State eased its China travel warning for China from Level Three "reconsider travel" to a Level Two "exercise increased caution" in response to Beijing's release of three U.S. citizens in a prisoner swap.
That sends the wrong signal to both Beijing and U.S. citizens, argue two Republican China hawks in the House.
"The State Department under President Biden claims that traveling to China presents the same level of risk as visiting countries like Denmark, Italy and the U.K. — but China is the only one of these nations with a troubling history of wrongfully detaining Americans," said House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Michael McCaul (R-Texas). That history merits China getting a Level Four "Do Not Travel" designation "rather than revising a travel advisory that now jeopardizes American lives," McCaul argued.
McCaul's concerns are shared by House Select Committee on China John Moolenaar (R-Mich.). The revised travel advisory increased the risk that U.S. citizens in China "could be held hostage in the future," Moolenaar said. The State Department should reverse that warning upgrade until Beijing "ends its practice of arbitrarily detaining American citizens or placing exit bans on them," he added.
State is standing by its decision.
"We did the right thing," said Mark Lambert, deputy assistant secretary for China and Taiwan, and head of the Office of China Coordination, informally known as China House.
Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), co-chair of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, also supports State's advisory downgrade. Easing the guidance shows that the U.S. is using "all the tools at its disposal" to free wrongfully detained U.S. citizens in China, Merkley said.
State's decision could help Beijing's efforts to get foreign visitor numbers back up to pre-pandemic levels. The adjusted advisory also helps "friendly people-to-people exchanges" essential to "stable, healthy and sustainable development of China-U.S.relations," said Chinese embassy spokesperson Liu Pengyu.
Some advocates for foreign citizens behind bars in China are aghast. The decision to downgrade the warning was "grossly irresponsible" given that there are "close to 300 American prisoners in China who have never had a fair and transparent trial and will never get one," said Peter Humphrey, who has spoken about his arbitrary detention in China and who now works to release foreign citizens behind bars in China.
That concern is shared by the Madrid-based nonprofit Safeguard Defenders, which specializes in exposing Beijing's harassment and imprisonment of government critics. The downgrade in the State Dept travel advisory undercuts that group's efforts to persuade other foreign governments to model their travel warnings for China on the previous "reconsider travel" designation, said Laura Harth, Safeguard Defenders' campaign director. "If governments like the U.S. start downgrading their advisories, it's going to be harder to get others to do enough to protect their citizens that travel to China," Harth said.
Uproar over congressional Covid origins report
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Beijing and House Democrats are both criticizing Monday's congressional report on the origins of the Covid pandemic.
The 500-plus page report by the GOP majority of the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic focuses on what it says were missteps in the Biden administration's pandemic response and blunders by senior New York State officials including former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. It alleges that mask and vaccine mandates were not effective, that remote learning set students back and that the six-foot "social distancing" requirement in public spaces "was arbitrary and not based on science."
The report's key conclusion, however, was about the origins of the pandemic. It stated that Covid emerged from Wuhan, China via “a lab-related incident involving gain-of-function research.”
The Committee's Democratic minority issued their own 57-page response on Tuesday. In it, they rebut many aspects of the report — including its conclusion that Covid emerged from a Chinese lab — while faulting it for overlooking the Trump administration's "disastrous pandemic response."
The Dems also come to the defense of Dr. Anthony Fauci who the report alleges led efforts to "push the preferred narrative that Covid originated in nature" rather than in a lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Select Subcommittee GOP members "prioritized partisan probes over meaningful opportunities to strengthen future pandemic prevention and preparedness and save future lives," the Dem's document said. Fauci responded to a request for comment by telling China Watcher to "read the Minority report." Subcommittee Chair Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio) declined to comment.
The GOP's report's conclusion is much more definitive about the source of the outbreak than the U.S. intelligence community has been. There is "broad consensus" within the U.S. intelligence community that Covid-19 was neither a bioweapon or the result of genetic engineering, but less certainty about whether it emerged via a lab leak, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines said last year.
The Chinese government dismissed the GOP report as "political manipulation." Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Tuesday there was "nothing credible" about the lab leak allegation and urged U.S. policymakers to "stop politicizing and weaponizing origins-tracing." Lin tried to turn the tables by re-upping a Chinese government conspiracy theory that Covid emerged from a bioweapons lab at Fort Detrick, Md and urged the U.S. to "give a responsible explanation" in response to those allegations.
TRANSLATING WASHINGTON
— PENCE PRAISES TRUMP'S 'TOUGH' CHINA APPROACH: Former Vice President Mike Pence may be trying to charm his way back into President-elect Donald Trump's good graces. Pence told a crowd at a China General Chamber of Commerce event in Chicago on Tuesday that despite Trump's threat of a sharp increase in tariffs on Chinese imports after he takes office next month, a second Trump presidency will help rather than harm U.S.-China ties.
"America's relationship with China will ultimately improve – not in spite of President Trump's tough approach to China, but because of it," Pence said in a speech. That will require Beijing to avoid viewing those tariffs as "punitive or hostile," he said, encouraging Beijing to instead see it as "an opportunity to enter negotiations in good faith and create a relationship that is truly fair to all."
— FEDS WARN OF 'ONGOING' CHINESE HACK: The federal government first noticed the major Chinese breach of global telecommunications systems this spring, officials said Tuesday, and warned that the intrusion is "ongoing" and likely larger in scale than previously understood. Jeff Greene, executive assistant director of cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and a senior FBI official said Tuesday that while agencies started cooperating on their investigations of Salt Typhoon's activities in early October, the effort was first detected in "late spring and early summer." He also warned that the breach is "ongoing" and that there was much law enforcement still did not know. POLITICO'S Maggie Miller has the full story here.
— EU: CHINA POLICY IS TRUMP-RESISTANT: The European Union's envoy to China dismissed speculation that the bloc will move closer to China if the Trump administration sharply increases U.S. tariffs against the E.U. "Whatever happens in the White House or from the White House, that doesn't mean that our unfair trade and investment relations [with China] will naturally change," E.U. Ambassador Jorge Toledo said in a speech at the China Global Think Tank Innovation Forum in Beijing on Wednesday, per the South China Morning Post.
— NATO CHIEF DECRIES CHINA-RUSSIA 'SABOTAGE': NATO members have resolved to improve their joint defenses against Chinese and Russian efforts to harm their countries, the bloc's Secretary-General Mark Rutte said Wednesday. "Russia and China have tried to destabilize our countries and divide our societies with acts of sabotage, cyberattacks, and energy blackmail," Rutte told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Brussels. NATO countermeasures will include "enhanced intelligence exchange, more exercises, better protection of critical infrastructure [and] improved cyber defense," Rutte added.
HOT FROM THE CHINA WATCHERSPHERE
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— WANG YI: U.S. 'CHOICES' DETERMINE TIES: Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi is hinting that the future of U.S.-China ties hinge on the incoming Trump administration's approach to Beijing. The "future direction" of U.S.-China relations depends on "choices made by Washington," Wang told a visiting delegation of the National Committee on American Foreign Policy on Tuesday, per an X post by Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Xie Feng. Wang didn't mention China's most immediate concern — the looming imposition of a sharp increase in U.S. tariffs by the incoming Trump administration. He instead referred to Chinese diplomatic boilerplate including the need for the U.S. to have a "correct strategic perception" of China and to respect its so-called "red lines" (which include Beijing's territorial claim to Taiwan)
— BEIJING LAUNCHES EXPORT CURBS COUNTER ATTACK: China's government has banned the export to the U.S. of two critical minerals — germanium and gallium — essential to production of semiconductors and solar cells. That export ban comes after the Biden administration on Monday unveiled a new set of restrictions on the sale of semiconductor manufacturing equipment and chips used in AI and advanced computing to China. The Commerce Department added 140 Chinese firms to the list of companies prohibited from doing business with U.S. counterparts, among other actions. Your newsletter host has the full story here (for U.S. pros!).
Beijing also reaped a victory in its efforts to rally support in the U.N. for its objections to those export restrictions. A U.N. General Assembly committee on Tuesday approved a China-backed resolution that calls for an end to "undue restrictions on exports to developing countries."
That approval should spur countries that impose export restrictions on China to "correct their wrongdoings," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said Tuesday.
— REPORT: BEWARE OF CHINESE LIDAR: The dominance of Chinese firms in supplying "lidar" sensor technology (used for both topographic mapping and for providing spatial awareness for driverless vehicles) poses a national security risk, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said in a report published Monday. That reliance on Chinese suppliers "leaves its users vulnerable to espionage and sabotage, potentially enabling Beijing to access sensitive U.S. data or disrupt critical operations," the report argued.
THREE MINUTES WITH …
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Adrian Zenz is a German academic who has spent much of the past decade documenting human rights abuses against Muslim Uyghurs in China's Xinjiang region. Zenz — the China studies director at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in Washington — has exposed violations including forced labor and involuntary sterilization of Uyghur women. Those revelations — which Beijing has dismissed as "malicious smearing" — helped power the passage three years ago this month of the Uyghur Forced Labor Protection Act. Zenz spoke to China Watcher about how Trump's approach to Xinjiang might differ from that of the outgoing Biden administration.
How do you rate the Biden administration's efforts to protect Xinjiang Uyghurs?
The Biden administration has been publicly way too quiet on the Xinjiang atrocity. A lot of that had to do with efforts to engage the Chinese leadership, not to offend them, to build those communication channels. They have largely prioritized other matters, such as microchips, AI and military technology. The Uyghurs and other human rights violations don't appear to have been a priority outside the early phase of the Biden administration. They never developed a public strategy of how they’re going to comply with their obligation under the 1948 Genocide Convention to prevent the risk of an ongoing genocide.
What should the Trump administration do differently on Xinjiang?
One of the most strategic things that the Trump administration could be doing is to develop a public framework for preventing indicators of genocide in the Uyghur region and for mainstreaming human rights in their China strategy. Not relegating human rights to a niche that can be put aside or traded against engagement. It will offend the Chinese side, but it will communicate a consistency to the Chinese that is essential.
Elon Musk has a Tesla showroom in Xinjiang and is a close adviser to Trump. Is that a problem?
He seems to be in it for the profit. I don’t see any sort of ethical responsibility on his part. He appears to be an admirer of the Chinese government and its strongman capabilities.
We can't be quite certain how clear and consistent a Trump administration would be on containing China’s unfair competition or rights abuses or authoritarian collaboration across the world with other authoritarian governments. For that you need a consistent, clear-eyed strategy and this is watered down by influences such as Elon Musk.
HEADLINES
Foreign Policy: China and North Korea throw U.S. war plans out the window
Asia Times: China backing wrong side in Myanmar's civil war
New York Times: From Chinese patriot to American spy: The unusual life of John Leung
Rest of World: Breaking down the world's tariffs against China's tech industry
ONE BOOK, THREE QUESTIONS
Anthony Wallace/Getty Images |
The Book: The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong's Greatest Dissident, and China's Most Feared Critic
The Author: Mark L. Clifford is a former longtime Hong Kong-based journalist and president of the nonprofit pro-democracy group the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.
Responses have been edited for length and clarity.
What is the most important takeaway from this book?
Jimmy Lai's historical importance as a Chinese dissident – and the difference that one man can make in standing up to totalitarianism.
Jimmy had money, he had a media empire, and he had principles that he lived by – and could die by. That combination has put him in direct confrontation with Xi Jinping. He spent his money freely to promote freedom even though it would hurt his business interests – and might lead to jail.
What's the most surprising thing you learned while writing this book?
What a brilliant businessman and innovative, wide-ranging thinker Lai is. And the depth of his patriotism — his love for Hong Kong and China …
Lai is on trial right now on charges including "collusion with foreign forces" and printing seditious materials. What does his case say about rule of law in Hong Kong?
Hong Kong's judges, prosecutors, political leaders and, of course, their Communist Party overlords, have extinguished political freedom in Hong Kong using rule by law.
Trial by jury, the right to a lawyer of one's choice, and the right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty have been swept away, as have promises that Hong Kong's civil freedoms would remain intact under Chinese rule.
Got a book to recommend? Tell me about it at pkine@politico.com.
Thanks to: Heidi Vogt, Maggie Miller and digital producers Emma Cordover and Dean Southwell.
Do you have tips? Would you like to comment on this week’s items? Email me at pkine@politico.com
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