Close All China Consulates, Slash Embassy Staff

China's consulate in Los Angeles on June 4, 2021. (Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images)

Commentary

Americans in recent weeks have been outraged by reports that the Chinese regime has established a police station on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in Chinatown.

The New York Post reported last month that the IRS-blacklisted ChangLe Association NY Inc., which had failed to file required reports for three consecutive years and thereby lost tax-exempt status in May, still owns and operates a “service station” at 107 East Broadway.

The location houses the Fuzhou Police Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau. The bureau’s stated purpose is to help Chinese nationals with Chinese-government identification cards and driver’s licenses.

Beijing reportedly has also used the station to track Chinese individuals of interest to the regime and, short-circuiting legal procedures, persuade them to voluntarily return to China.

Whether handling routine services or hunting down individuals, the bureau has been engaged in activities that violate American sovereignty. The United States and China don’t have an extradition treaty.

“This is a disgrace,” Beau Dietl, the celebrity retired NYPD detective, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “How in God’s name could they openly have these communist police stations in our country?”

Unfortunately, there’s no mystery as to why the Chinese regime felt that it could get away with this on American soil.

China’s boldness is the result of Presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—and perhaps those before them—knowing about improper and illegal activities of Chinese consular officials and Ministry of State Security agents in America but choosing to not expel or punish the perpetrators.

America’s highest elected leaders, in short, have failed to enforce American law against China.

We begin on the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. During the afternoon of July 1, 2021, an armed security guard attached to the Chinese consulate in New York caused facial injuries to Jane Stein, a Manhattan resident, as she was photographing a protest on the sidewalk outside the Chinese diplomatic outpost.

The incident—the guard shoved Stein’s heavy camera into her face, causing swelling above her left eye—occurred on the sidewalk just outside the consulate, on the north side of 42nd Street.

The consulate guard, in short, was interfering with Americans, on sovereign U.S. territory, exercising their First Amendment rights.

Although the FBI interviewed Stein about the assault, the Biden administration doesn’t appear to have taken any action against either the guard or China’s New York consulate.

The guard who assaulted Stein is seen in the photo below. The guard’s gun is clearly visible in this image. Stein is the woman with the camera.

(Photo by Tenzin Wangdue Rangzen)

“For years we have held protests at the consulate and they just ignored us,” Maura Moynihan, daughter of the late U.S. Sen. Daniel Moynihan (D-N.Y.), told Gatestone. “But now they are very bold because they know they can do as they like and the State Department won’t do a damn thing.”

American attitudes are, fortunately, stiffening, albeit late. For instance, on Oct. 20, the Justice Department unsealed indictments of Quanzhong An, his daughter, and five other Chinese nationals for surveilling and harassing a U.S. resident and his son. Those charged were allegedly part of Beijing’s notorious Operation Fox Hunt, a long-running effort to force individuals back to China. Prior to the recent indictments, the U.S. government often let Chinese agents off with only a warning, sometimes because of intervention by the State Department. This hasn’t been reported but is known among China watchers.

Law enforcement is essential, but it’s hardly an answer to China’s massive campaigns against the United States. For instance, only two of the defendants indicted last month were apprehended. The remaining five are believed to be in China. There, they'll likely remain beyond the reach of American justice.

One solution is to deny Chinese wrongdoers the safe havens they enjoy in America. China’s principal safe havens are its embassy and consulates.

In July 2020, Mike Pompeo’s State Department closed China’s Houston consulate. According to then-spokesperson Morgan Ortagus, the department ordered the closure of the facility “in order to protect American intellectual property and Americans’ private information.” Those reasons, of course, could be used to close all of China’s consulates and its embassy as well. China, in fact, used the Houston location to house a People’s Liberation Army intelligence unit that was fomenting violent Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests—in other words, working to overthrow the U.S. government.

It’s now time to close the remaining consulates—in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco—and send home almost all the Washington embassy staff.

China will retaliate by ordering reciprocal closures of America’s four consulates in China—in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenyang, and Wuhan—and embassy staff reductions.

Such actions will deny services to Americans and American businesses. Denial of consular services will be in America’s interest, however. For personal safety, business, strategic, national security, and moral reasons, Americans shouldn’t be in China at this time. The end of such services will encourage Americans to do something they should be doing on their own: leaving China.

One can argue that, as Chinese leader Xi Jinping closes off Chinese society from the world, the United States needs its embassy and consulates in China more than China needs its diplomatic outposts in America. There’s a measure of truth in that argument, but the United States should also be closing China’s nondiplomatic presences—primarily banks and companies—to even out the situation.

China uses every point of contact to try to bring down America, and American institutions are now being overwhelmed by the onslaught. It may sound drastic to some, but the survival of freedom and democracy in America critically depends on getting the Chinese regime out of the United States.

The best way to do that is to expel the military officers, spies, agents, provocateurs, and criminals finding protection in China’s diplomatic sites in the United States. Nothing else would better communicate resolve to Beijing than getting dangerous Chinese actors off American soil.

The Biden administration should of course be shutting down the Chinatown police station as well.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.