Academic brands proposed CPC ban 'an escalation of hostility'

The US government is reportedly working on a policy to ban members of the Communist Party of China, or CPC, and their families from entering the US, a move that "would represent an enormous escalation in hostility toward China by the Trump administration", according to Texas-based China scholar Jon Taylor.

At the end of last year the CPC had 91.9 million members, the Chinese government says. Adding family members, the sweeping ban, reported by The New York Times, could theoretically bar as many as 270 million Chinese from entering the US.

The US needs to have a coherent, consistent and intelligent China policy, and leaders from both countries need to meet as often as possible in good faith to reasonably discuss legitimate areas of disagreement, as well as areas of consensus, Taylor said.

"Yet current US leaders are contemplating a policy that will essentially end 40 years of normalized China-US relations and engagement. Such a move (the mooted travel ban), if it were to occur, would be willfully blind, strategically shortsighted, dangerous and ultimately self-defeating."

Enforcing such a policy would be problematic, Taylor said, because it is not always easy to identify Party members let alone their families.

"Would the US also ban all Chinese diplomats, given that most are Party members? Educators? Military attaches? SOE (state-owned enterprises) leaders? Again, such a broad-brush stroke suggests an implied threat by the US to cut off diplomatic relations with China."

Such a sweeping ban also undermines the proposed policy's premise, Taylor said, that it is "only targeting the Party, not the (Chinese) people".

Taylor said that by invoking the "Chinese Communist Party" as a pejorative and banning CPC members and their families from the US, the US is apparently "trying to convince 1.4 billion Chinese that the CPC is alien to the governance of their country. It attempts to delegitimize the CPC."

Countrywide support

However, "contrary to President (Donald) Trump's and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's wishes, there is a broad level of support in China for the CPC", Taylor said.

"The Party isn't going anywhere."

A Harvard University survey that involved in-person interviews with more than 31,000 individuals in urban and rural areas found that the Chinese government has a high level of approval, increasing from 86 percent in 2003 to 93 percent in 2016.

A new survey conducted by Edelman Intelligence of the US between April 15 and 23, which sampled more than 13,200 respondents in 11 countries, including the US, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, found that public trust in the Chinese government has risen to 95 percent, putting China at the top of all countries surveyed.

The US proposal may not come to pass, but such a move is one in a continuing series of policies aimed at using China as a convenient US election-year scapegoat, Taylor said.

"Some top US officials may think that it's an easy political win to ban nearly 20 percent of China's population and all of its ruling party from visiting the US. While stigmatizing the CPC may play well with certain constituencies during a US election year, such a policy would effectively lead to fully breaking off diplomatic relations.

"What is worrisome is that we will likely see further antagonism and decoupling as we head toward the November election."

There has been a shift in US China policy as evidenced by a speech by Pompeo at the Nixon Presidential Library in California recently, Taylor said. "There is now a much more strident ideological undertone that recalls the difficult days of the US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War."

Even if the ban does not materialize, Taylor views it as a possible watershed in China-US relations that will not be easy for future US presidents to overcome.

"Signaling hostility and suggesting that China's ruling party and government are not legitimate is both counterproductive and unsustainable for the world's most important bilateral relationship. It does neither side any good to be suspicious or to view the other as hostile or dangerous. That's how cold wars－and hot ones－start."