WASHINGTON/BEIJING • US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Wednesday that the State Department was designating the American operations of six more China-based media companies as foreign missions, a move he said was aimed at pushing back against communist propaganda.
Mr Pompeo also said at a State Department news conference that the United States would launch a dialogue on China with the European Union today, and that he would on Sunday begin a trip to India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Indonesia, expecting to discuss how "free nations can work together to thwart threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party".
The State Department named the newly designated publications as the Yicai Global, Jiefang Daily, the Xinmin Evening News, Social Sciences in China Press, the Beijing Review and the Economic Daily. This has brought to 15 the number of Chinese media outlets so designated this year.
The announcement was the latest US step to curb Chinese activity in the country in the run-up to the Nov 3 election, in which US President Donald Trump has made a tough approach to China a key foreign policy theme.
Mr Pompeo said the move was part of efforts to push back against "Chinese communist propaganda efforts" in the US.
"They are also substantially owned, or effectively controlled, by a foreign government," he said.
"We are not placing any restrictions on what these outlets can publish in the United States; we simply want to ensure that American people, consumers of information can differentiate between news written by a free press and propaganda distributed by the Chinese Communist Party itself. Not the same thing."
The US move amounts to "political oppression" and comes from a Cold War mentality, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a regular news conference in Beijing yesterday.
"This is the latest political suppression and stigmatisation of the Chinese media and journalists by the United States, and China will make the necessary response in due course," he said, urging the US to change its decision.
"The US approach to the Chinese media... exposes the hypocrisy of its self-proclaimed so-called freedom of the press."
Mr Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of Chinese state-backed Global Times newspaper, said the US had "gone too far".
He tweeted: "As long as Chinese media outlets suffer actual harm, Beijing will definitely retaliate, and US media outlets' operation in HK could be included in retaliation list."
The State Department has previously required Chinese media outlets to register as foreign missions, and announced in March that it was cutting the number of journalists allowed to work at the US offices of major Chinese media to 100 from 160.
In response, China expelled about a dozen American correspondents with The New York Times, News Corp's Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post.
The US also said last month it would require senior Chinese diplomats to get State Department approval before visiting American university campuses or holding cultural events with more than 50 people outside mission grounds.
Washington designated four major Chinese media outlets as foreign embassies in June and five in February. The designation requires the outlets to inform the US State Department of their personnel rosters and real estate holdings.
REUTERS
