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For years they have operated as news organisations in the United States, deploying scores of journalists to cover the major events of the day and to report back to their readers and viewers at home, even if the most important of those was the leadership of the Communist Party of China.
Now, the Trump administration has declared them not practitioners of journalism, but rather operatives of the Chinese state.
The State Department informed China on Tuesday (Feb 18) that its five foremost news agencies - Xinhua, CGTN, China Radio, China Daily and The People's Daily - will now officially be treated as foreign government functionaries, subject to the same rules as diplomats stationed in the United States.
The new action was described on Tuesday afternoon by a senior State Department official.
The decision - debated in Washington for years but never carried out, in part because of concerns over restricting the freedom of the press - comes at a time when the administration has moved aggressively on multiple fronts to fight what officials describe as extensive Chinese influence and intelligence operations in the United States.
In the past month alone, prosecutors have brought cases against Chinese intelligence operations involving scientific research at Harvard and the 2017 hack of Equifax, one of the nation's largest credit reporting agencies. They also charged Huawei, the telecommunications company, and two of its subsidiaries with federal racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets.
The legal assault on Chinese entities has unfolded even as bilateral tensions have flared over China’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic, which prompted the evacuation of US diplomats and other citizens from Wuhan, the city in central China at the source of the outbreak.
It is part of a concerted effort to put new pressure on China’s government barely a month after President Donald Trump signed a temporary truce in the trade war he started
Now, the Trump administration has declared them not practitioners of journalism, but rather operatives of the Chinese state.
The State Department informed China on Tuesday (Feb 18) that its five foremost news agencies - Xinhua, CGTN, China Radio, China Daily and The People's Daily - will now officially be treated as foreign government functionaries, subject to the same rules as diplomats stationed in the United States.
The new action was described on Tuesday afternoon by a senior State Department official.
The decision - debated in Washington for years but never carried out, in part because of concerns over restricting the freedom of the press - comes at a time when the administration has moved aggressively on multiple fronts to fight what officials describe as extensive Chinese influence and intelligence operations in the United States.
In the past month alone, prosecutors have brought cases against Chinese intelligence operations involving scientific research at Harvard and the 2017 hack of Equifax, one of the nation's largest credit reporting agencies. They also charged Huawei, the telecommunications company, and two of its subsidiaries with federal racketeering and conspiracy to steal trade secrets.
The legal assault on Chinese entities has unfolded even as bilateral tensions have flared over China’s handling of the coronavirus epidemic, which prompted the evacuation of US diplomats and other citizens from Wuhan, the city in central China at the source of the outbreak.
It is part of a concerted effort to put new pressure on China’s government barely a month after President Donald Trump signed a temporary truce in the trade war he started
