Trump’s cut to Chinese media points to US strategy shift

Bloomberg

The trade war may be on hold, but the US and China’s slide towards a new Cold War is only accelerating.
The Trump administration’s decision to effectively expel much of China’s state-run media staff is the clearest sign yet of a fundamental shift in how Washington manages its relationship with Beijing. Starting from March 13, four Chinese media companies will be allowed to employ a combined 100 Chinese citizens, a 40% cut from current levels, State Department officials told reporters.
The move casts aside long-held arguments that the US could steer the Communist Party in a more liberal direction by setting an example on human rights issues, such as freedom of the press. Instead, the Trump administration has expanded its demands for “reciprocity” to cover a host of other facets of the relationship after reaching a preliminary trade deal with China in January.
“For a long time, it was a generally shared judgment that displaying our open society for Chinese reporters and news organisations outweighed the lack of reciprocity for US,” said James Green, a former American trade official in Beijing who’s now a senior research fellow with Georgetown University’s Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues. “With this decision, that calculation has changed.”
That’s not just because Donald Trump is in the White House. Support for a more confrontational position towards China has been building over the past decade as Beijing increasingly challenged US leadership on everything from the security of the South China Sea to global rule-making to human rights. The more assertive policies of Chinese President Xi Jinping and the open hostility of Trump’s trade war have only lit a fire under that process.
The media has always been a key point of friction, since the two societies have such divergent views on the press.
Whereas American media companies are largely private and protected by the First Amendment, China’s news organisations are either state run or closely censored.
All are overseen by the party’s Central Publicity Department, or the “Central Propaganda Department”.
The exceptions in China are the foreign correspondents, whose reports provide rare windows into the world’s second-largest economy, especially during events that affect the world like the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. Media organisations have complained of pressure from authorities, even as Chinese state media companies expanded their own footprints in the US and elsewhere overseas.
Hu Xijin, editor of the Communist Party-backed Global Times newspaper, warned that China “is mulling countermeasures and is determined not to back off.”
Some 82% of Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China members said they experienced interference, harassment or violence while reporting last year, according to the group’s annual report. About one-fifth of respondents said they had difficulty securing visas due to issues related to their reporting.
China rejected that assertion, with Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian saying the country has never limited the number of US media agencies.