Donald Trump may have lost the presidential election in the United States and is expected not to take any key policy decisions but his rivalry with China continues. In the latest decision, the Donald Trump administration has revised the visa rules to restrict the members of the Communist Party of China of President Xi Jinping from travelling to the US.
In a statement issued on Thursday, the US State Department said the new visa policy reduces the maximum validity of B1-B2 visitor visas for the members of the Communist Party of China and their families from existing 10 years to just one month.
The Trump administration said the move is aimed at protecting the US from the “malign influence” of the Communist Party of China. The statement charges the Communist Party of China with working to influence American people through “propaganda, economic coercion, and other nefarious activities”.
Responding to the latest visa rules of the US, Chinese foreign ministry said the decision “is an escalated form of political oppression towards China by some extreme anti-China forces in the U.S. who act out of intense ideological bias and a deep-rooted Cold War mentality”.
Donald Trump has been engaged in a bitter rivalry with Xi Jinping’s administration of China for past couple of years. The US and China are involved in a bitter trade war worsening their bilateral relations which reached the lowest point in several decades in the post-Covid-19 period.
On many occasions, Donald Trump called the novel coronavirus as China Virus blaming the Xi Jinping administration for an outbreak in Wuhan last year turning into the Covid-19 pandemic leaving the US worst-affected country. In May this year, Donald Trump said he does not want to talk to Xi Jinping and threatened to cut ties with China completely.
China responded angrily alleging at point that the novel coronavirus emerged from a lab in the US in the wake of a similar charge being levelled against the communist regime.
Besides Covid-19, the US and China have sparred over Chinese territorial assertion in the South China Sea and the East China Sea, changing the autonomous character of Hong Kong, and alleged persecution of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang province of China.