The US on Wednesday restricted travel visas for members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the latest blow to relations between the world’s biggest economies.
The new rules allow CCP members and their immediate families to obtain single-entry visas, which are to be limited to one month. Previously, CCP members could obtain multiple-entry visitor visas of as many as 10 years in duration.
“The CCP and its members actively work in the US to influence Americans through propaganda, economic coercion, and other nefarious activities,” a spokesperson at the US embassy in Beijing said in an e-mailed statement. “For decades we allowed the CCP free and unfettered access to US institutions and businesses while these same privileges were never extended freely to US citizens in China.”
Photo: Reuters
The CCP has about 92 million members, including national and local government leaders. Its ranks also include millions of businesspeople, such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd (阿里巴巴) cofounder Jack Ma (馬雲), and members of the media and academia. It could also impact the children of CCP members, many of whom study in the US.
While Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩) said that she was not aware of the new visa rules, she urged the US to reverse course.
“China lodges representations with the US side and we hope people in the US will adopt a common rational view toward China, and give up their hatred and abnormal mindset toward the CCP,” Hua told a regular news conference in Beijing yesterday.
In related news, more than 1,000 Chinese researchers have left the US amid a crackdown on alleged technology theft, top US security officials said on Wednesday, adding that Chinese agents had already been targeting members of the incoming administration of US president-elect Joe Biden.
US Assistant Attorney General for National Security John Demers told a discussion hosted by the Aspen Institute think tank that the researchers had left after the US Department of Justice launched multiple criminal cases against Chinese operatives for industrial and technological espionage.
A department official said that they were a different group to those mentioned by the US Department of State in September, when it said the US had revoked the visas of more than 1,000 Chinese nationals under a presidential measure denying entry to students and researchers deemed security risks.
The official said the researchers Demers referred to, who US authorities believed were affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army, fled the US after the FBI conducted interviews in more than 20 cities and the state department closed China’s Houston consulate in July.
“Only the Chinese have the resources and ability and will” to engage in the breadth of foreign influence activity that US agencies have seen, Demers said.
US National Counterintelligence and Security Center Director William Evanina told the same event that Chinese agents were already targeting personnel of the incoming Biden administration, as well as “people close” to the US president-elect’s team.
A global survey showed that 60 percent of Taiwanese had attained higher education, second only to Canada, the Ministry of the Interior said. Taiwan easily surpassed the global average of 43 percent and ranked ahead of major economies, including Japan, South Korea and the US, data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for 2024 showed. Taiwan has a high literacy rate, data released by the ministry showed. As of the end of last year, Taiwan had 20.617 million people aged 15 or older, accounting for 88.5 percent of the total population, with a literacy rate of 99.4 percent, the data
Taiwan has arranged for about 8 million barrels of crude oil, or about one-third of its monthly needs, to be shipped from the Red Sea this month to bypass the Strait of Hormuz and ease domestic supply pressures, CPC Corp, Taiwan (CPC, 台灣中油) said yesterday. The state-run oil company has worked with Middle Eastern suppliers to secure routes other than the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 20 percent of the world’s oil and liquefied natural gas typically passes, CPC chairman Fang Jeng-zen (方振仁) said at a meeting of the legislature’s Economics Committee in Taipei. Suppliers in Saudi Arabia have indicated they
CCP ‘PAWN’? Beijing could use the KMT chairwoman’s visit to signal to the world that many people in Taiwan support the ‘one China’ principle, an academic said Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) yesterday arrived in China for a “peace” mission and potential meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), while a Taiwanese minister detailed the number of Chinese warships currently deployed around the nation. Cheng is visiting at a time of increased Chinese military pressure on Taiwan, as the opposition-dominated Legislative Yuan stalls a government plan for US$40 billion in extra defense spending. Speaking to reporters before going to the airport, Cheng said she was going on a “historic journey for peace,” but added that some people felt uneasy about her trip. “If you truly love Taiwan,
NEW LOW: The council in 2024 based predictions on a pessimistic estimate for the nation’s total fertility rate of 0.84, but last year that rate was 0.69, 17 percent lower An expected National Development Council (NDC) report expects the nation’s population to drop below 12 million by 2065, with the old-age dependency ratio to top 100 percent sooner than 2070, sources said yesterday. The council is slated to release its latest population projections in August, using an ultra-low fertility model, the sources said. The previous report projected that Taiwan’s population would fall to 14.37 million by 2070, but based on a new estimate of the total fertility rate (TFR) — the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime — the population is expected to reach 12 million by
RSS