US-China relations

Beijing has warned Chinese citizens not to travel to the United States, in what analysts said is a political move that will worsen already heightened tensions between the two powers. In a travel advisory released on Monday, China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism cautioned against visiting the US, citing its “overreaction” to the coronavirus outbreak and the “unfair treatment” Chinese tourists received in the country. “Do not travel to the US,” the ministry said in a notice. This appeared to be a direct response to Washington’s decision nearly a month ago to deny entry to foreigners who have been to China within the past 14 days.  Since the outbreak, more than 60 countries have imposed some

The United States must prepare for a possible military conflict with China, including by developing new weapons and strengthening ties with allies, a senior Trump administration official said on Thursday. In remarks that underscored growing competition between the US government and an increasingly powerful Chinese military, Chad Sbragia, deputy assistant secretary of defense for China, said the Pentagon needs to “build and deploy a more lethal, resilient joint force.”  That includes more hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, robots and laser weapons, Sbragia told the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, which was set up by Congress in 2000 to evaluate the defense implicat

The still-evolving coronavirus outbreak has already disrupted trade and economic performance both regionally and globally. Perhaps the most insidious impact of the virus stems from China’s pre-eminent position as a producer of intermediary products that feed into global supply chains. China accounts for almost one-fifth of world manufacturing and Chinese intermediary products are predominant in the electronics, car, machinery and textile sectors. Subtracting Chinese inputs from these supply chains will, in some instances, cause production to grind to a halt, as has been the case for Hyundai Motor in South Korea. In other instances, alternative or workaround solutions will be found but they w

The Trump administration is adopting increasingly aggressive tactics in its bid to counter Chinese theft of trade secrets with the arrest of a prominent Harvard professor and high-profile investigations into top universities. The move against one of the nation’s foremost scientists – Charles Lieber, chairman of the Harvard chemistry department – and the threat of criminal charges against Harvard, Yale and other prestigious universities over reporting violations has sent shock waves through the scientific establishment. Unlike many other recent cases involving scientists of Chinese descent, Lieber is Caucasian. He and leading universities are also being accused of failing to disclose ties to

The US State Department on Tuesday said it will officially treat five Chinese state media outlets as government agencies controlled by Beijing. These media organizations include China’s state news agency Xinhua, CGTN, China Radio International, China Daily and a distribution branch for the People’s Daily, the Communist Party mouthpiece, called Hai Tian Development USA.  The decision will require the staff of these entities to register with the US State Department the same way that embassy and consular employees do, a State Department official said. “These five entities all meet the definition of a foreign mission under the Foreign Missions Act,” the official said. They are “substantially own

The outbreak of a new coronavirus in China has added a new and intensifying source of tension to an already fractured relationship with the United States. With threats to public health, transport and the global economy looming, it was no surprise that the two countries would clash as the epidemic that apparently started at a seafood and live animal market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan spread to the US, among other countries. But the mysteries of a coronavirus that jumps species to find a home in humans – also known as a zoonotic disease – has opened a new, acrimonious rip into bilateral ties that were already tearing apart. It has pitted science against politics. Amid confusion among

A smartly dressed Chinese man was spotted in a field in rural Iowa, in the United States, in autumn 2011. This was enough to raise suspicion in a community that was 97% white and the local police went to check it out. Thus began perhaps one of the stranger cases of industrial espionage in recent years, one that highlights the threat of industrial theft and the overblown atmosphere of fear and mistrust that exists between the United States and China over intellectual property and trade. The field in question was planted with genetically modified seed lines developed by agricultural giant Monsanto, a company that guards its intellectual property – like hybrid seeds and fertilizer – with great

Mastercard has won Chinese government approval to enter China’s payments market. It’s a major step in the American company’s decades-long effort to reach the country’s 400 million middle-class consumers. China’s central bank on Tuesday said it had approved an application from Mastercard’s joint venture to set up a business to settle payments in yuan, the official Chinese currency. Beijing has long insisted on state control of key financial infrastructure despite Washington’s insistence on giving American companies wider access to the Chinese market. The approval by China was granted three weeks after Beijing and Washington signed their initial trade deal, in which China promised it would fur

The US Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged four members of the Chinese military over a 2017 hacking into one of America’s largest credit reporting agencies and stealing the personal data of around half of all US citizens. The alleged hack of Atlanta-headquartered Equifax also allowed the hackers, determined by the DOJ to be members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to obtain trade secrets related to the company’s database designs. “This was an organized and remarkably brazen criminal heist of sensitive information of nearly half of all Americans,” US General Attorney William Barr, unveiling the nine-count indictment, said on Monday. The four individuals alleged to have committed th

Ningxi Xu first heard about the outbreak of an unknown pneumonia-like disease in China from a fellow plane passenger, hours before she was set to land in Wuhan to spend the Lunar New Year with her family. Xu, 30, brushed it off. It couldn’t have been a big issue as she hadn’t yet seen anything in the news, she reasoned. But from the moment her father picked her up from the airport wearing a face mask, her perception of the situation began to shift. Wuhan’s streets grew empty. Reports of people contracting the disease flooded her phone daily. News of family friends falling ill reached their home. As of Monday, more than 910 people have been killed by the new coronavirus, and Xu now finds hers