‘Political oppression’: China hints at payback for US limits on Chinese state media

China signalled it will retaliate against the United States for cutting the number of Chinese people allowed to work in US bureaus of major Chinese state-owned media.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Tuesday that the US was conducting “political oppression” on Chinese media in the US, and the move would seriously harm ties between the two countries.

“The Americans broke the rules of the game first, and we have to follow,” he said.

He accused the US Department of State of making the decision based on a cold war mindset and ideological bias, and showing hypocrisy about freedom of press.

The US Department of State said on Monday that the employment restrictions would apply to five organisations the administration of US President Donald Trump considers propaganda arms of the Chinese government. The restrictions are expected to reduce the number of their US-based Chinese employees to around 100 from 160 now.

Zhao said that this meant 60 Chinese journalists would effectively be “expelled”, and that China reserved the right to take further action.

Responding to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s statement that the limits were reciprocal to China’s expulsion of three Wall Street Journal reporters, Hua Chunying, the Chinese ministry’s information department chief, said the US had “kicked off the game”.

“Reciprocity? 29 US media agencies in China vs 9 Chinese ones in the US. Multiple-entry to China vs Single-entry to the US. 21 Chinese journalists denied visas since last year. Now the US kicked off the game, let’s play,” Hua said in a tweet.

Hua had summoned a representative from the US embassy in Beijing to protest about the move, the foreign ministry said.

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The State Department said the “institution of a personnel cap” applied to state news agency Xinhua, China Global Television Network (CGTN), China Radio International, China Daily and Haitian Development USA.

Under the new rules, the organisations must notify the US by Friday of which Chinese employees they will keep in the US. The employment restrictions will go into effect on March 13.

It follows Beijing’s decision last month to revoke the visas of three Wall Street Journal reporters after the newspaper stopped short of apologising for a headline on an opinion piece, which was not written by the reporters. The headline referred to China as the “real sick man of Asia”, an echo of the 18th and 19th centuries when China was weak and frequently subjected to foreign domination.

Pang Zhongying, a Beijing-based international relations scholar, said that this kind of interaction between Beijing and Washington was a throwback to the Cold War, when the US and the Soviet Union occasionally expelled each other’s diplomats, agents and journalists.

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“This is a typical cold war symptom, and the China-US relationship has developed quite some symptoms,” he said.

But Pang said that the US Department of State had shown a degree of restraint, with the caps applying only to organisations already classified in the US as “foreign agents”, rather than to all Chinese firms, and forcing those organisations to downsize rather than closing or banning them.

“So it’s still a suspected cold war, not a confirmed case yet,” Pang said. “We should see how China really reacts, aside from the harsh statement.”

Additional reporting by Reuters