THE NET NEWS- GLOBAL

Jeff Moon, a former assistant US trade representative for China, noted the State Department said the Houston order was a response to Chinese intellectual property theft and said that raised questions about why only one consulate was targeted.

“If that were the real reason, the US would close the San Francisco consulate, which covers Silicon Valley,” said Moon, who was among those who suggested politics might be at work. “This action is red meat for Trump supporters who are eager to retaliate against China and divert attention from Trump’s disastrous Covid-19 policy.”

US State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said the consulate was directed to close “in order to protect American intellectual property and Americans’ private information,” but did not immediately provide additional details of what prompted the closure. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who is scheduled to give a speech on China Thursday and just completed a trip in Europe to urge a tougher stance against Beijing, declined to offer details about the consulate decision. The State Department didn’t respond to requests for further explanation.

Sen. Angus King, an independent of Maine who caucuses with Democrats, told CNN’s John Berman on “New Day” Wednesday that he was not aware of any “recent intelligence of particular Chinese activities, either with regard to our elections, or the whole confrontation between our two countries — theft of intellectual property” that may have driven the decision.

A former official who left the Trump administration last year said that Trump often pushed back on advisers who urged him to impose tougher punitive measures on China out of concern that it would jeopardize trade negotiations.

Even so, as Covid-19 began devastating public and economic health in the US, the President’s Republican allies and influential White House staff, including Jared Kushner, began arguing that one way to energize the President’s political base is by blasting China over its failure to stem the spread of the disease early on, administration officials and three people familiar with Kushner’s thinking have told CNN.

Moon, who now runs China Moon Strategies, a consultancy on US-China trade and economic relations, said targeting the Houston consulate was a way for the President to thread the needle between appearing tough yet not taking on much risk.

The US and Chinese governments informally pair their consulates, with China’s Houston facility informally linked to the US consulate in Wuhan. Moon noted that the Wuhan consulate reportedly remains closed due to coronavirus, “so China could ‘close’ and escalate the diplomatic war as little as possible.”

A ‘vast network of spies’

On Wednesday, Biegun told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Trump moved to close the consulate because of increasing aggression by China.

Biegun pointed to “commercial espionage and intellectual property theft from American companies; unequal treatment of our diplomats, businesses, NGOs, and journalists by Chinese authorities; and abuse of the United States’ academic freedom and welcoming posture toward international students to steal sensitive technology and research from our universities in order to advance the PRC’s military capabilities.”

“It is these factors which led the President to direct a number of actions in response, including yesterday’s notification to the PRC that we’ve withdrawn our consent for the PRC to operate its consulate in Houston, Texas,” he said.

On Wednesday, Trump said “it’s always possible” that he will order more Chinese consulates closed, adding that US officials thought there was a fire at the Houston consulate but apparently “they were burning documents.”

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, the acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote on Twitter Wednesday that closing the Houston consulate “needed to happen,” and claimed it is a “central node of the Communist Party’s vast network of spies.”

Asked about that allegation, a current US intelligence official agreed, telling CNN that “of course it was” used for spying. “We’ve been watching them for a while,” they said. That official declined to comment on why the decision was taken now to close the Houston consulate.

Instead, Assistant Attorney General John Demers said the administration moved against the Houston consulate to disrupt China’s theft of defense and trade secrets after a “slow buildup” of activity. “It wasn’t so much one particular thing but a slow buildup of what we’ve been seeing over time and a decision made to take a strong step to not just confront it in a general sense but to actually disrupt it by closing that consulate,” Demers said.

Former officials were perplexed. Danny Russell, the former Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs who left the department in 2017, said that when he was at State and the National Security Council, “the Chinese consulate in Houston did not have a particular reputation as an acute vector of espionage.”

“It is very hard for me to figure out what China could do uniquely from its consulate in Houston that it could not equally well do from its consulates in Boston, LA, or NY, from the embassy in DC or through non-official cover,” Russell said. “It is inconceivable that shutting down a consulate will stop espionage.”

“The drama of this action makes it seem like a teaser for Pompeo’s” speech Thursday, Russell added. “This has a very distinct wag-the-dog feel to it.”

The report’s authors used various satellite technologies to analyze marine traffic in northeast Asia in 2017 and 2018 and found that hundreds of Chinese fishing vessels were sailing in waters off North Korea. The Chinese ships appeared to be fishing there illegally, pushing North Korea’s own fleet, which is poorly equipped to travel long distances, further away from the North Korean coast and into Russian and Japanese waters.

But that does not appear to have deterred some 900 Chinese ships in 2017 and 700 the following year, according to Global Fishing Watch’s report.

The nonprofit said these Chinese ships likely caught more than 160,000 metric tons of Pacific flying squid, one of the region’s most valuable seafood products, in 2017 and 2018 — more than South Korea and Japan combined during the same period. The estimated catch was worth more than $440 million.

Jaeyoon Park, a senior data scientist at Global Fishing Watch and co-lead author of the study, said that the vessels spotted comprised “about one-third the size of China’s entire distant water fishing fleet.”

“It is the largest known case of illegal fishing perpetrated by vessels originating from one country operating in another nation’s waters,” he said.

With so many ships near the North Korean coast, the country’s own fishing fleet was then pushed out, forced to sail further away from shore to find their catch, and the consequences were deadly, according to Jungsam Lee, another one of the study’s co-authors.

“It is too dangerous for them to work in the same waters as the Chinese trawlers,” Lee said. “That’s why they’re pushed to work in Russian and Japanese waters and that explains why some of North Korea’s damaged vessels showed up on the beaches of Japan.”

CNN has reached out to China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs for comment.

A sustainability issue

Northeast Asia’s waters are some of the most opaque and contested seas and fisheries anywhere in the world. China, Russia, Japan and the two Koreas are all engaged in some sort of territorial dispute with one another.

Fish stocks there have been declining dramatically in recent years, another major problem that the parties have failed to work out. Pacific flying squid stocks have dropped by 80% in South Korean waters and 82% Japanese waters since 2003, according to Global Fishing Watch.

Experts like Park believe that though Japan and South Korea have worked independently worked to make squid fishing more sustainable, “the absence of multilateral cooperation and information-sharing between all the countries involved in this transboundary fishery means it is impossible to get sound science and a regional management plan in place for the stock.”

South Korea’s Ministry of Oceans and fisheries said it was reviewing the findings, while Masanori Miyahara, the president of the Japan Fisheries Research and Education Agency, said in a statement accompanying the Global Fishing Watch study that the lack of shared data is “is a major challenge considering the critical importance of squid in the region.”

“Illegal fishing in these waters is a very serious matter in Japan,” Miyahara said.

Park said his team’s research has highlighted a “fundamental failure in properly and transparently managing a shared resource” and that there is an “urgent need for cooperation between the countries involved in this fishery.”