SinoInsight 1
On Oct. 2, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services issued a policy guidance to address “inadmissibility based on membership in or affiliation with the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party.”
Per the guidances, “In general, unless otherwise exempt, any intending immigrant who is a member or affiliate of the Communist Party or any other totalitarian party (or subdivision or affiliate), domestic or foreign, is inadmissible to the United States.”
OUR TAKE
1. Back in July, several news outlets reported that the Trump administration is considering a sweeping travel ban for CCP members and their immediate family. Trump’s informal China advisor Michael Pillsbury told the media at the time that a travel ban would be “an important step in the direction that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been going in the last few months, to delegitimize the Communist Party and its 90 million members.”
The Trump administration appears to be working towards the delegitimization of the CCP and its members with the USCIS Oct. 2 policy guidance.
2. The U.S. immigration ban on Communist Party members is bad news to CCP officials and members as America is one of, if not the top, immigration destination for them and their families. Those who still desire to migrate to the U.S. will have to find ways to renounce the Party and even demonstrate their opposition to the CCP, including offering intelligence on crucial topics like CCP elite politics, origins of the coronavirus, the persecution of religious groups and ethnic minorities in China, and forced organ harvesting.
The immigration ban will also vex overseas Chinese (including dissidents) with green cards who have long postponed applying for citizenship to ease their travel to China. They are at risk of being deported back to a vindictive CCP government if their permanent residency is revoked under updated immigration rules. Like CCP officials and members looking to migrate to the U.S., overseas Chinese who are not yet citizens in the States could try to make a case for their permanent residency status and apply for citizenship by quitting the Party and showing opposition to Communist China.
3. To prevent CCP infiltration, other countries could follow in America’s footsteps and impose similar immigration restrictions. A frontpage Yomiuri Shimbun report on Oct. 5 announced Japan will be tightening its visa inspection process, especially for Chinese researchers and students, starting April 2021 over increasing concerns of espionage and foreign interference. The report adds that Tokyo believes the precaution is necessary, in the event that foreign students and researchers compromise sensitive technology and security intelligence, transmitting it back home.
4. We previously analyzed why a travel ban on CCP members will “compound Xi Jinping’s domestic political problems” and lead to escalations in the CCP factional struggle. With the factional struggle now in a “perish together” phase, there is a high chance that members of the Party elite in the “anti-Xi coalition” or their proxies could leak sensitive, regime-imperiling information (or convincing disinformation) to the U.S. or other countries as they seek to defect and/or embarrass the Xi Jinping leadership. The information leaks could embolden the U.S. and other countries, who have acknowledged the complexity and seriousness of the “China challenge,” to attack a vulnerable Xi (who is reframing failures as “accomplishments” and taking credit for them) and pressurize the CCP regime further.
SinoInsight 2
On Oct. 6, Taiwan’s main opposition party Kuomintang put forward a motion in the legislature calling on the Tsai Ing-wen government to re-establish diplomatic ties with the United States.
KMT legislator Chen Yu-chen said the proposal was inspired by Taiwan foreign minister Joseph Wu’s reluctance to rehabilitate U.S.-Taiwan relations. In an interview with NPR on Sept. 22, Wu said, “We are not seeking full diplomatic relations with the United States at this moment. But, certainly, there’s a lot of room for us to explore how to strengthen the relations between Taiwan and the United States, and we have been advocating that Taiwan and the United States should further strengthen the economic relations, trade relations, political relations, even security relations.”
Some Democratic Progressive Party government officials and legislators praised the KMT, which has been drawing closer to Beijing in years past, for finally “taking the right direction” and “rediscovering” its conscience. However, DPP legislator Hsu Chih-chieh said that the KMT “must be insane” for wanting the Taiwan government to pursue diplomatic relations with America when “just days ago, it said restoring ties with the U.S. would only seriously provoke the Chinese Communists.”
OUR TAKE
1. While the pro-Beijing leaning KMT might indeed have “rediscovered” its conscience as the Sino-U.S. new cold war makes it more beneficial to side with the United States, the timing of the motion leads us to believe otherwise. This move comes only four days prior to the Republic of China’s national day (while the PRC’s national day is on Oct. 1). A move at this time gives the CCP valid grounds to intimidate the ROC and even provoke a Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis. This suggests that the KMT does not have the DPP or Taiwan’s best interests at heart in advocating for the Tsai government to restore diplomatic ties with America.
By proposing to re-establish ties with the U.S., the KMT is likely looking to “rehabilitate” its image as a pro-Beijing party while placing Tsai’s DPP government, whose recent rise in popularity coincides with the best U.S.-Taiwan relations in over four decades, on the spot.
2. The KMT’s proposal has interesting implications for when a “Berlin Wall” moment arrives for the CCP. In that scenario, the U.S. might have a strong interest in re-establishing formal ties with “democratic China,” as represented by the ROC, in preparation for the collapse of Communist China as represented by the PRC. Before the KMT motion, the two major parties in Taiwan were split on the issue of restoring relations with America. Now, however, if both parties are in sync on the issue (at least on paper), the KMT will find it hard to renege its stance when the right moment presents itself for the ROC and the U.S. to re-formalize ties. Put another way, if the KMT’s Oct. 6 proposal was engineered by the CCP, it could backfire spectacularly later on in the most unexpected way.
