China guts US press corps in Beijing with mass expulsions

Bloomberg

China took the unprecedented step of expelling more than a dozen US journalists from three American newspapers, escalating a wider battle with the Trump administration as the coronavirus pandemic threatens to drag the global economy into a recession.
China’s foreign ministry said US reporters at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post must hand in their media cards within 10 days, calling the move a response to US caps on Chinese media imposed early this month. It wasn’t immediately clear how many journalists would have their visas revoked.
The journalists are prohibited from relocating to work in Hong Kong and Macau, semi-autonomous regions that in theory enjoy greater press freedoms and control over immigration policy. China also asked five US media outlets to submit detailed personnel and asset information to the government, a decision that mirrored a US move to designate five Chinese media outlets as “foreign missions.” This requirement applies to Voice of America, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Time.
Relations between the US and China have deteriorated in the past few months, even after the world’s biggest economies reached a phase-one deal to end a tit-for-tat trade war. The US has lobbied nations to rebuff China’s cheap infrastructure loans and avoid using Huawei Technologies Co equipment for 5G networks, while also highlighting human-rights abuses against minority Muslims and supporting pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong.
The virus pandemic has further hurt ties, with the US accusing Beijing of delaying visits to China by American health experts in the aftermath of the outbreak. In recent days they’ve blamed each other for the origin of Covid-19, with Trump calling it a “Chinese Virus” in a tweet. A Chinese foreign ministry official, meanwhile, has pushed a conspiracy theory the US army may have had a role in spreading the pathogen.
The US and China “are locked in a downward spiral and neither side appears willing to pull out of nosedive,” said Jude Blanchette, the Freeman Chair in China Studies at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “So long as the domestic politics in both countries remains conducive to a hardening position, we should expect tensions to grow, and increasingly, to grow exponentially.”

‘Foreign Missions’
The spat over media access began in February, when the US designated five Chinese media companies as “foreign missions.” Beijing then revoked the press credentials of three Wall Street Journal reporters, ostensibly to retaliate for an op-ed that called China the “real sick man of Asia.” The US in turn ordered four Chinese state-owned news outlets to slash number of staff in US.