The Trump administration has revoked the visa of a Chinese national working for Beijing’s state-run news agency Xinhua in the United States.
The State Department told The Epoch Times in a statement on June 1 that the administration “has the strongest commitment to the freedom of expression.”
“We will continue to insist on a relationship with China based on fairness and reciprocity, putting the American people first. We cannot accept the continued lack of reciprocity for U.S. media in China, nor any attempts by the Chinese authorities to silence U.S. media.”
The move comes months after Beijing expelled a New York Times reporter. In a recent article discussing China’s expulsion of China correspondent Vivian Wang in February, The New York Times said it didn’t request any U.S. government retaliation, but it did issue a statement on Friday calling for Wang to be reinstated as a credentialed journalist in China and urging both governments to “reverse this deterioration in journalist access.”
The State Department didn’t answer questions on whether the Chinese reporter’s visa cancellation was a tit-for-tat action.
Chinese officials told The New York Times that the decision to expel Wang was a response to Taiwan President Lai Ching-te’s video appearance at The New York Times’ DealBook summit in December last year, according to the paper, which noted that Wang “played no role in the event.”
At the DealBook summit, Lai said China’s military drills around Taiwan were becoming “increasingly frequent and intense,” while Beijing’s “united front” influence operations against the democratically governed island were becoming “more serious,” according to a transcript from Taiwan’s presidential office.
At a regular briefing on June 1, Lin Jian, spokesperson for the Chinese regime’s foreign ministry, accused the outlet of providing Taiwanese officials a platform to “peddle separatist rhetoric.” Lin also accused Wang of breaking a local law governing foreign media and foreign journalists.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which claims Taiwan as a province of its own, has labeled Lai a “separatist” for his outspoken defense of the island’s sovereignty.
Lin also responded to the U.S. expulsion of the Xinhua reporter by accusing Washington of engaging in "political suppression" against Xinhua journalists.
The State Department also pointed to the disparity in conditions under which U.S. reporters work in China compared with Chinese journalists in the United States.
“China has long imposed onerous restrictions on foreign journalists operating in China, including those working at U.S. media organizations,” the department said. “Journalists routinely report harassment, monitoring, and intimidation, especially when reporting on topics that the Chinese Communist Party deems ‘sensitive.’”
‘Information Vacuum’
In China, the U.S. media presence is thin. All foreign journalists in China are required to obtain accreditation from Beijing’s foreign ministry. The Chinese regime has used accreditation and the visa process to deny entry or expel foreign journalists whose work has upset the CCP or to punish what the regime considers unfavorable coverage of it.Theresa Fallon, director of the Center for Russia Europe Asia Studies, welcomed the Trump administration’s decision to revoke the Xinhua reporter’s visa.
“Finally—a US administration is using reciprocity,” Fallon wrote in an X post on May 30.
“Beijing denies many foreign media companies visas if they don’t like their reporting. This has led to an information vacuum in which the Chinese Communist Party actively shapes its own narrative, what many call propaganda.”
Peter Mattis, president of The Jamestown Foundation, suggested that the Trump administration should have taken a more “proportional response” instead.
“A narrowly reciprocal 1-to-1 response,” Mattis wrote on X on May 30. “A proportional response would have been to remove a corresponding percentage of state ‘journalists’ from US.”
The Congressional-Executive Commission on China on May 29 warned about the consequences of the CCP's restricting freedom of the press.
“When foreign journalists are expelled and the free flow of news and information is restricted, it sets dangerous limits on what the world knows about China and what the Chinese people know about the world,” the commission wrote on X.