U.S. Orders China to Close Houston Consulate, Citing Efforts to Steal Trade Secrets

He said the Houston consul general, the top Chinese official there, and two other diplomats were recently caught having used false identification to escort Chinese travelers to the gate area of a charter flight in George Bush Intercontinental Airport. He described the Houston consulate, which he said “has a history of engaging in subversive behavior,’’ as the “epicenter” of research theft by the Chinese military in the United States, without giving details to support that assertion.

In Beijing, a spokesman for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs urged the United States to reverse the decision immediately.

“Otherwise China will certainly make legitimate and necessary reactions,” said the spokesman, Wang Wenbin. His remarks suggested that China would, at a minimum, close a U.S. consulate in China.

The consulate in Houston has about 60 employees. There are six other Chinese diplomatic missions in the United States: the embassy in Washington, an office at the United Nations and consulates in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago.

The closure of the consulate in Houston may be less detrimental to U.S. relations with Beijing than shutting down a different one would be. It is the “sister” diplomatic mission to the American consulate in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the coronavirus outbreak first emerged. The State Department evacuated its consulate in Wuhan after the initial outbreak; it is not clear when it might fully reopen.

Mr. Wang called the move illegal under international law, and described it as the latest in a series of aggressions.

“For some time, the United States government has been shifting the blame to China with stigmatization and unwarranted attacks against China’s social system, harassing Chinese diplomatic and consular staff in America, intimidating and interrogating Chinese students and confiscating their personal electrical devices, even detaining them without cause,” he said.

“If the relationship between China and the United States continues to deteriorate unchecked,” he said in a telephone interview in Beijing, “the next result will be the severing of diplomatic relations.”

The Trump administration’s decision was a significant escalation of its effort to tighten the reins on Chinese diplomats, researchers, scholars, journalists and others in the United States.

The administration’s restrictions have included issuing travel rules for diplomats and requiring several Chinese state news organizations to register as diplomatic entities while limiting their visas. The administration is also considering a travel ban on members of the Communist Party and their families. Such a move, if enacted, could affect an estimated 270 million people, and it has been widely criticized as too sweeping to be practical.

In May, the Trump administration announced a travel ban on students and researchers of graduate-level and higher who have ties to Chinese military institutions. Some officials estimated that would result in the expulsion of thousands of Chinese citizens from the United States.

On Monday, the Justice Department announced visa fraud charges against Song Chen, a visiting Stanford University researcher accused of concealing her active membership in the Chinese military. In January, the F.B.I. announced it was seeking a Boston University student, Yanqing Ye, who had hidden her affiliation with the People’s Liberation Army when applying for a visa. American officials believe Ms. Ye is in China.

In December, the U.S. authorities arrested a Chinese cancer-cell researcher, Zaosong Zheng, at Boston Logan International Airport and charged him with trying to smuggle 21 vials of stolen biological research back to China.

And on Tuesday, the Justice Department said it had indicted two Chinese hackers accused of trying to steal information about coronavirus vaccine research.

There have been other clashes over suspected espionage by employees at Chinese missions. In September, the State Department secretly expelled two employees of the Chinese Embassy in Washington who were accused of driving with their wives onto a sensitive military base in Virginia. That was believed to be the first such expulsions in more than three decades. Beijing demanded a reversal of the action.

Some former officials voiced skepticism over the Trump administration’s latest move.

Daniel Russel, who served in Mr. Stilwell’s job during the Obama administration, said closing the Houston consulate “further reduces the few remaining diplomatic channels between the two sides and is a step that will prove difficult to reverse.”

“The China accusation that this move has more to do with presidential politics than with intellectual property is hard to argue with,” said Mr. Russel, now a vice president at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

In 2017, the Trump administration ordered Russia to close its consulate in San Francisco, along with two annexes near New York and Washington, in retaliation for Russian restrictions on the number of American diplomats in Moscow. Those moves stemmed from the furor over Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election, the fallout from which is still felt, despite Mr. Trump’s outreach to the Russian president, Vladimir V. Putin.

In recent weeks, the department has begun to slowly return diplomats and their families — only to face rigorous health screening and quarantine rules that the Americans had complained were onerous and even in violation of the Vienna Conventions on diplomatic and consular relations. The Houston consulate closure could add another obstacle to efforts by the American diplomats to return.

Keith Bradsher contributed reporting from Beijing, and Megan Specia from London. Claire Fu contributed research from Beijing.