Washington orders Beijing to close Houston consulate
BEIJING/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has told China to close its consulate in Houston in a dramatic worsening of ties between the world’s two biggest economies, and a source said Beijing was considering shutting the US consulate in Wuhan in retaliation.
Washington “abruptly demanded” closure of the Houston consulate on Tuesday, China’s foreign ministry said, calling the move an “unprecedented escalation.” The editor of an official Chinese media outlet said China had been given 72 hours to do so.
The State Department said the move was made “to protect American intellectual property and Americans’ private information.”
Beijing condemned the order and threatened retaliation, but did not say what measures it might take.
Speaking on a visit to Denmark, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo repeated accusations about Chinese theft of US and European intellectual property, which he said were costing “hundreds of thousands of jobs.”
While offering no specifics about the Houston consulate, Pompeo referred to a US Justice Department indictment on Tuesday of two Chinese nationals over what it called a decade-long cyber espionage campaign that targeted defense contractors, COVID researchers and hundreds of other victims worldwide.
“President Trump has said enough - we are not going to allow this to continue to happen,” Pompeo told a news conference. “That’s the actions that you’re seeing taken by President Trump, we’ll continue to engage in this.”
The New York Times quoted the top US diplomat for East Asia, David Stilwell, as saying that the Houston consulate had been at the “epicenter” of the Chinese army’s efforts to advance its warfare advantages by sending students to US universities. “We took a practical step to prevent them from doing that,” Stilwell told the Times.
Stilwell said China’s consul general in Houston and two other diplomats had been caught recently engaging in questionable activity past the security check area at Houston airport while awaiting takeoff of a charter flight to China that Beijing had arranged due to air travel restrictions during the coronavirus pandemic.
He said the diplomats were escorting travelers to the gate area and Air China had paperwork with false birth dates for the diplomats, the Times reported.
China’s embassy in Washington
did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Stilwell’s remarks.
Ties between the United States and China have worsened sharply this year over a range of issues, from the coronavirus and telecoms gear maker Huawei to China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea and its imposition of a new security law on the former British colony Hong Kong.
The deterioration comes in the run-up to the November US presidential election, in which President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, Joe Biden, have appeared to compete over who can look tougher in response to China.
Late on Tuesday in Houston, firefighters went to the consulate after smoke was seen. A source said the US government believed incriminating documents were being burned in the courtyard. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the consulate was operating normally, declining to comment further on those reports.
“The unilateral closure of China’s consulate general in Houston within a short period of time is an unprecedented escalation of its recent actions against China,” Wang told a regular news briefing.
“We urge the US to immediately revoke this erroneous decision. Should it insist on going down this wrong path, China will react with firm countermeasures.”
Republican Senator Marco Rubio, acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told Fox News the Houston consulate was “kind of the central node of a massive spy operation — commercial espionage, defense espionage.”
“They use businessmen as fronts in many cases to try to influence members of Congress and other political leaders at the state and local level. So it’s long overdue that it be closed.”