Opinion: Should the Chinese consulate return to Houston?

Accusations of spying, smoke rising from documents being burned in a courtyard, one superpower evicting another from its building on Montrose Boulevard — it has been just over a year since Houston was thrust in the middle of the international spotlight on June 23, 2020, when the State Department shuttered the People’s Republic of China consulate. Was it the right thing to do? Should the Biden administration offer to reopen it, so long as China reopens the American Consulate in Chengdu, which it shuttered in retaliation? And above all, if the consulate is reopened, should Houstonians adopt a new stance — less naive and more wary — or go back to “business as usual” in dealing with representatives of the Chinese government? I believe the answer to the last question is yes. From my observation, Houston’s civil society failed to see that China’s interests aren’t always aligned with our own, something that not even the obvious advantages of a closer working relationship with a major trading partner should have allowed us to forget. But before we look closely at that, it’s worth reviewing last year’s decision and its consequences. Evidence suggests that the official rationale for closing the Houston consulate — espionage at enormous scale — was exaggerated. Mike Pompeo, then secretary of state, referred to the PRC Consulate in Houston as a “center of malign activity,” especially industrial espionage, a claim repeated by many Trump administration officials and presidential contenders in Congress, but a full detailing of the extent of these “malign activities” has never been made public. Nor has the Department of Justice’s China Initiative exposed any exceptionally high levels of espionage in our region: Of the 84 cases mentioned by the DOJ over the last three years and across the six Chinese consular regions in the U.S., only 11 are in the Houston consular region, and of those only three involved theft of trade secrets or purchases of advanced technology. In my own conversations with U.S. diplomatic and security officials, it was privately explained that although the PRC engaged in espionage in all its consulates — all technically sophisticated powers do this — if there was an epicenter of such Chinese government industrial espionage surely it would be at the San Francisco consulate, near Silicon Valley, or in the New York or Boston consulates, where there are more companies and universities conducting advanced research than in the nine-state and territory area served by the PRC Houston consulate. Certainly the high level of DOJ indictments in the Northeast and the West Coast supports this conclusion. One official explained it to me this way: The Houston consulate was closed because it was the less important one, so as not to escalate too rapidly a diplomatic war with China, and because our region’s state delegations to Congress, and our state governments, would not oppose its closure, despite the fact it disadvantages our state economies in terms of future exports to China. In 2017, before Trump’s trade war cut trade from both countries, China was the third largest goods export market ($15.6 billion) for Texas, after Mexico and Canada, and in 2016 China was the second largest ($4.3 billion) services export market, after the U.K. Estimates are that some 75,000 Texas jobs, mainly in the oil and gas and semiconductor industries, and in the education, royalties, and travel service sectors, depended on the Chinese market. Whether or not closing the Houston consulate was the right thing to do in 2020, Texas and neighboring states must now bear the economic consequences of not having convenient visa services, legal services and official international trade promotion events that facilitate trade between our region and the world’s second-largest economy. This is especially important to consider as it is likely that trade in the near future will depend on trade between countries with higher vaccination rates — the United States, Japan and the OECD countries, but also China — and during the Trump administration’s internecine trade war with China and the abandonment of the Trans Pacific Partnership many of our trade partners in Asia have signed free trade agreements among themselves, and increasingly with China. When the global economy goes into high gear again, why should Texas and the South be left behind without the reopening of the PRC Consulate in Houston and the American consulate in Chengdu, one of China’s fastest growing regions? Also important to consider is the human cost of a lack of nearby consular representation. Tens of thousands of Chinese students and citizens living in the former Houston consular region — including some trapped by the pandemic — have not been able to access support from their government, and in turn many thousands of Americans living in Southwest China have been denied nearby consular assistance from the State Department, including representation if they are arrested or detained. But if we are to allow the Chinese consulate in Houston to reopen, should we return to “business as usual” in our dealings with Chinese government officials? I believe we should take advantage of this reset and think about whether or not Houston’s past relationship with the Chinese consular officials was a beneficial and mutually respectful one. The monitoring of Chinese consular officials is being strengthened elsewhere in America, and should be at a reopened consulate in Houston as well. In addition, Houston civil society — our civic groups, our professional associations, our philanthropic foundations, our corporations, our universities and our cultural institutions — needs to have a critically important public discussion among ourselves about how we should welcome any potential return of Chinese government representatives. I believe history shows many in our community viewed the Chinese consular officials unquestioningly as a friend or partner, when in fact they should have been viewed more soberly as a competitor who could also be a foe. About a decade ago, as I was leaving a fundraiser for Chinese community work and cultural exchange managed by the Chinese consulate, I encountered the education consul and asked what she thought of the event. Instead of thanking me for attending, she scolded me, asking why my employer, a think tank at a private university, did not “buy a table” to donate to their cause. I informed her that we have a policy against buying tables at fundraisers, and she scoffed and turned away. I let it go, but I wanted to ask her: “American citizens pay taxes to support public diplomacy by our consulates in China, why can’t Chinese citizens support your government’s public diplomacy?” I had another conversation, over five years ago, with a Chinese scholar of international relations at a major university in China, that was even more revealing about how the Chinese government viewed its public diplomacy in cities like Houston. We were talking about the effectiveness of American centers at universities in China, and of Confucius Institutes at American universities, and they said they understood why the American government opposes Chinese government influence in America, but did not understand why American civil society welcomed their party officials so enthusiastically. “Didn’t Houston society just throw a gala for our visiting Communist Party Politburo member responsible for education, charging $250 a seat to attend?” they said incredulously. “Just to listen to a speech written by the Central Propaganda Office?” I had no good explanation in reply, because there is none. When I first went to China to teach English in the 1980s, just a few years after then Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s historic trip to Houston and normalization of relations in 1979, both Americans and Chinese were so worried about missteps and unintended consequences that they studiously stuck to a clear guiding principle: reciprocity. Since then it has become very clear that America’s liberal democratic order and civil society, which thrive on openness and free speech and private initiative, have been far more permissive of Chinese government influence than the Chinese Communist Party would allow American diplomats and citizens to be in China. With the brutal repression of Uyghur and Tibetan ethnic minorities and religious minorities in China, the assault on Hong Kong’s civil society and corrosion of its independent judiciary, and the Chinese government’s obstruction of investigations into the origins of COVID, its diplomats will have much explaining to do if they are allowed to return. Why should Chinese state enterprises have access to American capital markets to continue perpetrating these inhumane and immoral policies? Houston’s civil society should not stop there, of course, and treat with equal disdain the representatives of other authoritarian regimes and dictatorships that have consulates in Houston. Finally, given America’s own history of racism and violence, Houston’s civil society should loudly oppose linking the crimes of the Chinese government and the lives of ordinary, innocent Chinese and Asian Americans living in Houston. President Donald Trump egged on anti-Chinese hatred — stoking the embers of bigotry burning since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — and President Joe Biden and Congress have responded by signing the Hate Crimes Act to combat the increasing attacks on Asian Americans in particular. Reopening the Chinese Consulate in Houston and the American Consulate in Chengdu would clearly help many thousands of ordinary American and Chinese citizens who are just trying to live their lives and go about their private business, and reopening would also help our Texas economy compete with other regions in America exporting to China in the future, but we need to ask ourselves how best to have a sober and mutually respectful engagement with Chinese officials in Houston in particular if they return to the Montrose. We should start by asking whether or not we are letting Chinese diplomats have more access to American society than the Chinese government is allowing our diplomats, and our citizens and scholars and business people, to enjoy in China. Lewis is the C.V. Starr Transnational China Fellow at Rice University’s Baker Institute.

Opinion: Should the Chinese consulate return to Houston?

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