(Reuters) - The United States gave China 72 hours to close its consulate in Houston amid accusations of spying, marking a dramatic deterioration in relations between the world’s two biggest economies.
Richard Grenell, who served until recently as acting director of U.S. national intelligence, suggested the United States could close the Chinese consulate in tech-heavy San Francisco.
“It’s a close call. I would have done both (Houston and San Francisco) but it also makes sense to start with one,” he told Reuters by text.
Chinese Consulate in Houston Intervened in US Political Movement
http://chinascope.org/archives/24225
Radio Free Asia (RFA) published an article explaining the reason that the U.S. closed China’s Consulate in Houston.
The article stated that the U.S. has known that the staff members at the consulate were conducting suspicious activities, but, for a while, it did not take any action. The Second Department of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which is the PLA’s intelligence unit, sent staff members from a large network company, with fake IDs, to China’s Consulate in Houston. Those technicians used a large video platform’s backend data to identify people who might participate in the Black Lives Matter (BLM) and ANTIFA’s protests and then created and sent them customized videos on how to organize riots and how to do promotions.
The purpose was to “weaponize” big data technology. It delivered relevant materials precisely to those people who were most likely to participate in the protests, while other people could not even find those videos.
RFA did not spell out the company names. A Twitter account said the technicians were from Huawei and the video platform they used to identify candidates and push videos to was TikTok.
Sources:
1. Radio Free Asia, August 7, 2020
https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/ear/ear-straw-08062020081345.html