U.S. – China Spat Over Quarantine And Consulates Continues

DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama

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The U.S. closed down the Chinese consulate in Houston in revenge for Chinese demands that diplomats coming from abroad to China undergo Covid-19 testing and quarantine. No U.S. media I have read has yet confirmed that fact which Moon of Alabama was first to report:

The unmentioned reason for the State Department's move is a squabble over virus testing and quarantining of U.S. diplomats who are supposed to return to China.
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The squabble continues. The U.S. diplomats have not returned and the consulate in Wuhan has still not reopened. The U.S. order to close the Chinese consulate in Houston is obviously an attempt to press China into lifting its testing and quarantine demands for U.S. diplomats.

The Global Times, China's flagship English language media, has asked two experts. Both confirmed our reporting:

Wu Xinbo, dean of the Institute of International Studies, Fudan University:

According to my understanding, it is a move to pressure Beijing to get more US diplomats back to their posts in China. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19, the US had hurriedly evacuated quite a number of American diplomats and citizens from China. Now Washington believes it is time for them to continue their China mission. Yet negotiations on their return did not go quite smoothly. ...

Wei Zongyou, a professor at the Center for American Studies, Fudan University

It has been quite some time that China and the US have remained locked in negotiations over conditions for the return to China of US diplomats and their family members. The harsh requirement for the closing of the Chinese Consulate General in Houston can be regarded as the US retaliation over this dispute. ...

The U.S. media still behave as if they have not noticed the unreasonable demand of Cootiestan's State Department. China would risk another Covid-19 outbreak if it were to exempt newly arriving diplomats from testing and quarantine.

China responded to the U.S. order to close its consulate in Houston with a mirror order to shut down the U.S. consulate in Chengdu. But notice how different the purposes of those outlets gets described:

As the United States lashed out against the “new tyranny” of China, Beijing on Friday ordered the closure of the American consulate in Chengdu, a retaliatory move that threatens to drive the two powers into an even deeper divide.

Beijing blamed the Trump administration for the deterioration in relations, calling its own action justified after Washington told China this week to shutter its consulate in Houston and accused its diplomats of acting illegally.
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[T]he Trump administration has said the closure of the Houston consulate was necessary because it had become a hub of illegal spying and influence operations, allegations that Chinese officials have denied.
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[T]he closure of the consulate in Chengdu, in Sichuan Province, the westernmost of the five American consulates in mainland China, deprives the United States in a city that is a hub for China’s commercial expansion across Central Asia. Chengdu is also its most valuable diplomatic outpost for gathering information on Xinjiang and Tibet, the two sometimes-restive regions in China’s far west.

Both regions have been the locations for wide-ranging security crackdowns that have drawn international criticism as abuses of human rights.

The Chinese consulate in Houston is accused, without any evidence, of being a "hub of illegal spying and influence operations". The U.S. consulate in Chengdu is, according to the New York Times, involved in "gathering information on Xinjiang and Tibet" and also used for the fake "human rights" campaigns against China - i.e. CIA information operations. Why is the chosen depiction so different?

As U.S. has many more diplomats in China than China has in the U.S. we can therefore be sure that the U.S. has more agents doing their nefarious stuff in China than Chinese agents are doing in Washington, Houston and elsewhere.

Some U.S. diplomats who had evacuated in January and February are now returning to China:

Washington and Beijing have been negotiating for weeks over the terms of how to send U.S. diplomats back amid disagreement over COVID-19 testing and quarantine procedures, as well as frequency of flights and how many each can carry.

There is no word yet how the testing and quarantining of these diplomats will be handled. I find it likely that China has stuck to its demands and that the U.S. conceded on the issue. That would of course be another issue the media would not want you to know.

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