‘Preposterous’: China’s protests over new US diplomatic rules fall on deaf ears
- Chinese envoys must now give State Department five days’ advance notice of visits to state and local officials or research or educational institutions
- Beijing contends move violates Vienna Convention but is powerless to challenge it, an international law expert says
Chinese officials howled last week when the Trump administration – protesting alleged restrictions American envoys face in China – announced new rules to track the official activities of Chinese diplomats on US soil.
The Chinese embassy in Washington contended that the move was a violation of the Vienna Convention, the United Nations’ 1961 treaty governing diplomatic relations. And claims that US diplomats' movements in China were restricted were “simply not true”, the foreign ministry in Beijing asserted the next day, calling on Washington to withdraw its new rules.
Yet Beijing’s protests have fallen on deaf ears – not only among those in the current US administration, but also among former US diplomats who have spent years on the ground in China.
The new rules require Chinese diplomats to notify the US State Department in advance of meetings with state and local officials and visits to research and educational institutions. In a previously undisclosed detail, a State Department official said on Tuesday that, “notwithstanding emergency situations”, the Chinese foreign mission must submit such notifications five days prior to travel.
The change, officials said last week, was intended to dump a “paperwork burden” on the Chinese mission to the US – and thus force Beijing to relax its own restrictions on American diplomats in China that had stymied their ability to do their job for “many, many years”.
Beijing’s assertion that US emissaries are free to meet with whomever they please was “preposterous”, said James Green, a former State Department and trade official who in 2018 ended five years as Washington’s top trade representative at the US embassy in China.