China vows to protest ‘every single incident’ of mistreatment of Chinese arrivals in US
- Chinese embassy accuses US border authorities of heavy-handedness, sending back hundreds of Chinese citizens since July 2021
- The renewed criticism comes a week after presidents Xi Jinping and Joe Biden agreed to take further steps to expand people-to-people exchanges
In a statement on Monday, the Chinese embassy in the United States accused the US of “unjustifiably” sending back nearly 300 Chinese citizens since July 2021, including more than 70 Chinese students that it said had legal and valid travel documents.
In one case, a visiting Chinese scholar was detained for 22 hours on arrival at San Francisco International Airport in February before having his visa cancelled. He was deported back to China and banned from entering the US for five years, the embassy said.
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Four US customs officers were said to have interrogated the scholar for 12 hours in the “secondary inspection” area where further interviews are conducted, questioning the traveller’s political background, research field, purpose for visiting the US and funding methods.
“Similar incidents have emerged, one after another with increasing frequency recently,” the embassy said, adding that even Chinese officials invited by the US for a friendly visit were not immune from being “harassed”.
“Such acts by the US side far exceeded the scope of normal law enforcement and are driven by strong ideological bias.”
The Chinese embassy and some consulates have formally protested to the US State Department, National Security Council, Homeland Security and Customs and Border Protection, according to the statement.
“The Chinese side has been ‘lodging representations on every single incident’ toward the final resolution of the issue,” it said.
The issue has moved up China’s agenda for managing the relationship with the US.
In February, China’s top diplomat Wang Yi raised it with his US counterpart Antony Blinken and Public Security Minister Wang Xiaohong brought it up with Alejandro Mayorkas, the US secretary for homeland security.
But the Chinese embassy once again said the recent actions of American border control officers violated the common understanding reached by the two presidents.
“China urges the US to … stop poisoning the environment of public support for relations between the two countries,” the embassy said.
Less than two weeks before the Chinese embassy’s statement, China’s foreign ministry issued a travel advisory to its citizens visiting the US, warning them there may be “various unexpected situations” such as “unwarranted interrogation and harassment”.
The US updated its travel advisory on China in July, recommending Americans reconsider visiting the country because of “arbitrary” law enforcement, including issuing exit bans.
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In an address to US business leaders in California in November, Xi said Beijing was ready to invite 50,000 young Americans to China for exchanges and study in the next five years. China has since seen more groups of US students arrive.
According to data from the Institute of International Education, Chinese students have outnumbered any other foreign group studying in the US for 15 consecutive years.
In the school year ending in September 2023, there were 289,526 Chinese students in the US, a slight decrease of 0.2 per cent from the previous year and the lowest since 2013-14, but the number of graduate students among them rebounded for the second straight year, according to the institute’s annual study funded by the US government.
US ambassador to Beijing Nicholas Burns said in December that the number of American students in China rose to 700 last year after falling sharply to 350 in 2022. But the total was still far below the nearly 15,000 recorded in the 2011-12 academic year.
