The US has ordered China to close its consulate in Houston in what an official in Beijing blasted as an outrageous and unjustified move – leading the country to consider shuttering the American diplomatic office in Wuhan.
“We have directed the closure of PRC Consulate General Houston, in order to protect American intellectual property and American’s private information,” US State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said in a statement Wednesday.
Ortagus added that Washington would not tolerate Chinese violations of their “sovereignty and intimidation of our people, just as we have not tolerated the PRC’s unfair trade practices, theft of American jobs, and other egregious behavior.”
Beijing said the closure was “an unprecedented escalation” and said it would retaliate if Washington did not reverse the decision, Reuters reported.
“China urges the US to immediately withdraw its wrong decision, or China will definitely take a proper and necessary response,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said.
The US government has been harassing Chinese diplomatic staff for some time, Wang added, as well as “intimidating and interrogating Chinese students and confiscating their personal electrical devices, even detaining them,” according to Reuters.
The move — which the Chinese official said will sabotage relations between the two powers — came hours after firefighters responded to a fire reportedly sparked by the burning of documents at the Consulate General of China in Houston.
Relations between the two countries have frayed on a number of fronts, running the gamut from trade to Beijing’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and its policies in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea.
On Tuesday, US prosecutors charged two Chinese nationals in a decade-long cyber espionage campaign in which they allegedly stole information on weapons designs, drug information, software source code and personal data.
The order to shutter the Chinese consulate comes as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is in Europe, where he has been rallying leaders to take a tougher stance with Beijing, and meeting with exiled dissidents, CNN reported.
The Chinese consulate in Houston was opened in 1979 — the first in the year the US and the People’s Republic of China established diplomatic ties, according to Agence France-Presse.
Besides its embassy in Beijing, the US has five consulates in mainland China — Shanghai, Guangzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan and Shenyang.
With Post wires