ExclusiveUS Issues 10th China Travel Warning in 30 Days | China in Focus

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Our top story. A dramatic turnaround in Turkey. President Trump says the U.S. will remain in NATO. And Washington will give Ukraine the green light to build its own Patriot missiles. But the ceasefire with Iran is over. New strikes could happen at any moment. The latest from the summit. The U.S. embassy has issued what appears to be its 10th travel warning to China in the past 30 days. It says even minor legal issues could A senior Taiwan official warning Beijing is slowly eroding Taiwan's freedom and sovereignty in plain sight. Why she says the international community may not realize the threat until it's too late. And one of the biggest corruption cases in China involved more than 300 million dollars. The Chinese official was sentenced to death. His wife and daughter obtained U.S. citizenship, allowing the family to secure assets outside China. Today's top story is still focusing on the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey. President Trump blasted several European allies, including Italy, France and Germany, for not backing the U.S. against Iran. But after a closed door meeting with allied leaders, he said the U.S. will remain in NATO. We're also seeing a massive shift on two major war fronts. Trump's tone on Ukraine has softened with a major announcement allowing Kiev to build its own Patriot missiles. And in the Middle East, President Trump declared the ceasefire deal was, quote, over after Iran attacked commercial ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Because they're scum, that's the way they act and that's the way they've done it for 47 years. And I think more than anything else is I got to know him and I'm not sure I want to make a deal with him. We can play games, but I'm not sure I want to make a deal. Let's just finish the job. Speaking on the sidelines of the summit, the president warned that the U.S. will probably hit Iran again Wednesday night. This comes just a day after the U.S. military carried out a massive wave of strikes, hitting more than 80 targets inside Iran. That operation hit right as Iran was holding a funeral for its late supreme leader. Iranian state media reported heavy explosions on Karg Island, a critical hub for Tehran's oil exports. Probably hit him hard again tonight. It may be a big attack and it'll knock out a lot of stuff. We don't knock out nothing. We knock out a lot. President Trump is threatening to target Iran's critical civilian infrastructure next and says he may reimpose a naval blockade. Iran is firing back. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps claims it launched missiles and drones targeting 85 U.S. military sites across Bahrain and Kuwait. Meanwhile, NATO's chief, Mark Rutte, is backing Washington, calling the U.S. retaliation absolutely necessary. Now to Ukraine, where we're seeing a major shift from President Trump. We're going to give a license to you to make pictures. That's pretty cool, right? This way you can't complain that we're not giving them enough. Make them yourself. Ukraine's President Zelensky praised the sit down, calling it a good meeting, and said he expects both teams to follow up immediately. And Trump teased that he's calling Russian President Vladimir Putin later today. He told reporters he's going to ask Putin directly, when are you going to stop the war? On top of that, NATO officially locked in a massive military aid package for Ukraine worth roughly $80 billion. And President Trump appeared satisfied with his European allies after the meeting. We just concluded a very successful NATO summit. In the working session this morning, we discussed the progress other members are making toward the 5% target, and they're making great progress. NATO Secretary Mark Rutte confirmed that member states have already hit the 4% GDP defense spending mark. Allies are also pouring nearly $31 billion into fuel storage to lock down the alliance's supply chain. Leaving the meetings, President Trump praised the atmosphere, saying there was, quote, love in the room for the United States. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz echoed that sentiment, adding Europe's days of free riding are officially over. Greenland, back in the spotlight, NATO Chief Mark Rutte pledged Wednesday to implement the framework he and President Trump agreed on for Greenland, a Danish territory. That agreement was reached at a meeting in Davos, Switzerland, back in January. Meanwhile, President Trump calling Greenland a big problem. Greenland is very important for the United States, but it's not important for Denmark. In fact, when Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in less than one day, Hitler beat them out in one day, took over, and they asked us to take care of Greenland. In fact, we took Greenland, and then stupidly we gave it back. We shouldn't have given it back to them because we're the ones that need it. We need it for protection of the world, not just the United States. The framework deal requires NATO allies to step up on Arctic security. Meanwhile, President Trump's renewed push on Greenland, a Danish territory, is drawing a response from the Danish Prime Minister. She says Denmark is ready to defend every inch of NATO, including its own territory. On the sidelines of the NATO meeting, President Trump ordered an immediate halt to all U.S. trade with Spain. He has expressed frustration with Spain, a member of the European Union. The country has not agreed to NATO's new defense spending target, and its socialist leadership refused to let the U.S. use its airspace or bases on its territory for the Iran war. I don't want anything to do with Spain. Cut off all trade with Spain, please. Trump said on Wednesday he'd ordered an immediate halt to all trade with Madrid. It's over the country's refusal to commit to NATO's new defense spending target of 5% of GDP. Here's some of the numbers behind their trading relationship. Just over $26 billion worth of goods is how much the U.S. exported to Spain last year. That's according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The data further showed imports of around $21 billion. CaixaBank said the U.S. made up just under 5% of the total sales of Spanish goods abroad two years ago. That's well below the weight of the U.S. market in other EU giants like Italy, Germany and France. Wednesday's announcement is the second time Trump has told U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Besant to stop commerce with Spain. But trade between the two countries continued normally after his first such promise in March. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's office said it was treating Trump's statements as business as usual. And it didn't intend to change the, quote, excellent relations it enjoyed with Washington. Spanish Prime Minister Sanchez later said he had a very cordial conversation with President Trump. The two discussed the FIFA World Cup and golf, but not defense spending. Another warning for Americans traveling to China. The U.S. embassy in China has issued what appears to be its 10th travel warning in the past 30 days. It cautions that even minor legal issues could lead to detention, imprisonment or being barred from leaving the country. The latest alert issued Wednesday warns U.S. citizens they can be punished for breaking local laws even unintentionally. The embassy says anyone under investigation could face an exit ban, meaning they may not be allowed to leave China until the case is resolved. It also warns that some detentions and investigations could last months or even years. The message is the latest in a series of warnings from U.S. officials about the risks Americans may face in China. The State Department previously warned that Beijing can enforce laws unpredictably, including using exit bans that Americans may only discover when they try to leave. The warnings come as tensions between Washington and Beijing remain high. U.S. officials say Americans, business people and others with ties to the United States may face increased scrutiny in China. China sentenced a former official to death over a record bribery case. Yang Youlin was accused of taking more than $300 million in bribes, equivalent to $25,000 a day. Yang served as executive deputy director of the Economic and Technological Development Zone in Nanjing. While it's not a particularly high-ranking position, roughly comparable to a deputy director of economic development for a U.S. city, it still gave him influence over construction contracts, land transfers and financing. That influence allowed him to collect millions in bribes. Yang has a strong connection in the U.S. In 2001, his wife and daughter obtained U.S. citizenship. This is a common pattern among Chinese officials. They remain in China earning money, while their spouses and children move abroad, often to secure assets. There is no evidence showing how Yang's daughter obtained U.S. citizenship. However, some Chinese officials have taken advantage of birthright citizenship by having children born in the United States. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last month to uphold birthright citizenship, President Trump congratulated China's leader, Xi Jinping. A senior Taiwan official sending out a warning to the West. She said Beijing is turning up the heat on Taiwan, sending ships to claim jurisdiction in waters near the island. But the danger is the Chinese regime is moving slowly, testing limits little by little. So by the time the international community realized the severity of the situation, it could already be too late. Here's Kuang-Bi Ling, who heads Taiwan's Coast Guard. If an authoritarian country does not change the status quo through a one-off military action, but instead advances a little bit each day, increasing Coast Guard activity today, expanding military exercises tomorrow, conducting so-called law enforcement inspections of commercial shipping the day after, and then in the next step, interfering with our undersea cables, the maritime shipping order, or information systems, then we have to ask from which day can we say that the status quo has already been changed? She lays out the biggest risks of Beijing's gray zone tactics. Each individual operation may not appear to trigger an international crisis. With each increase in pressure, we may think that Beijing's action hasn't met the threshold of war. But when a series of actions accumulate, it may create an entirely new status quo. Quen's warning comes after a series of actions from Beijing in recent months. It started with Chinese Coast Guard ships entering waters near Kinmen, a Taiwan-controlled island located just over a mile from China. After being expelled, the Chinese ships returned a few days later, this time entering waters near the Pratis Islands, an atoll southwest of Taiwan. Days later, Beijing sent four ships to waters east of Taiwan, saying it's carrying out a special operation. Here's what a Chinese Coast Guard told Taiwan Coast Guard personnel. Both Taiwan and mainland belong to one China. These waters are under China's jurisdiction. Taiwan's Coast Guard pushed back. China does not have any sovereignty in waters east of Taiwan. You have violated international law by entering our waters without permission. Please turn around immediately and leave our waters at once. Things escalated the following day. Five Chinese ships claimed jurisdiction over waters near Taiwan. They questioned three commercial ships passing near the island about their point of origin and destination. And it didn't stop there. Earlier this month, China's Coast Guard announced a new law enforcement patrol in waters east of Taiwan, claiming the area falls under China's jurisdiction. Taiwan rejected the claim, saying the Chinese regime has no sovereignty over waters east of It's worth noting that while Beijing sends military jets near Taiwan's western airspace on a daily basis, it's extremely rare for Chinese ships to operate east of the island. The Taiwan official warned of the consequences of Beijing's boiling frog strategy. Shipping companies may start adjusting routes, while insurers and investors recalculate risks. Frontline law enforcement personnel will come under greater pressure, and the international community will gradually get used to situations that weren't normal to begin with. Because time and again, they think each incident falls short of a crisis. In the end, we may suddenly find out that even though no decisive war had broken out on any particular day, yet the original status quo no longer exists. Guanzi China is also using similar tactics on Japan and the Philippines. She's calling on democracies to recognize Beijing's tactics, coordinate more closely, and respond before a crisis happens. Coming up, the hidden wealth of high-ranking Chinese officials. Could this hurt the Chinese Communist Party when it's revealed? You have to keep hammering that, and this potentially could put the Chinese on the back foot in their cognitive warfare efforts against us. More on that after the break, here on China In Focus. Welcome back to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. NTD's White House correspondent Iris Tao asked President Trump about his views on communism. Here's what he said. Thank you, Mr. President, for doing this. Iris Tao with NTD, with Assistant Media with the Epoch Times. On communism, you've been issuing a wake-up call to Americans at home about the dangers of communism. And now you're speaking on the world stage. What's your message to people both living under communist and socialist regimes, but also people living under democracies like in Europe and America who might not have realized how close communism has come to home? I think this country, with this thing that's going around, is in more danger than it was during World War I, World War II. If you talk about September 11th, if you talk about Pearl Harbor, that was big danger. I think the concept of us going communist, because one thing that happens when you go communist, you never come back, never comes back. You die in squalor. You die a horrible death. You die in squalor. And it gets very evil and very nasty. China's leaders want to project power. Their hidden wealth could be their biggest weakness. A U.S. intelligence review is examining the fortunes of Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping and other top officials. What happens if those details come to light? We spoke with retired U.S. Marine Colonel Grant Newsham. He's a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy. When it comes to sending a message or hurting China where it hurts, you actually wrote a whole substack piece about this, especially when it comes to hidden wealth, if you will, in China, or the wealth of the leaders. The U.S. intel community, or IC, is investigating the wealth of CCP leader Xi Jinping, the other six standing Politburo members, and the full 25-member Politburo. That report is due later this year. How big of a blow would that be when those numbers come out to the leadership of the CCP? What are your suggestions to either the intel community, Congress, or even media to cover this? Potentially, it would really hurt the Chinese leadership because this is the one thing, it's their obscene wealth, derived by corrupt means, that they can't blame on anyone else. They can't say, well, it's the foreigners, it's the Americans who are bullying China, but rather, we're the ones who got the money, no one else did it. Try explaining that to the 600 million plus Chinese who live on $5 a day or less. They may not be very happy about that. Actually, a friend of mine who really knows Chinese corruption, he said that actually it may not make people angry so much as it does make them jealous at how successful these guys have been at stealing so much money. But I would suggest that that jealousy actually turns into anger before a certain point is reached. But the key thing here was to get good information and to keep getting it. This is such a vast target that you could probably spend the next 5 to 10 years, 24-7, just going after Xi Jinping's wealth the way that it's hidden. So there's plenty of evidence to keep investigators busy for a long time. And now what you have to do is to expose it, not just in one report that gets announced and forgotten in a few days, but you expose it via Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, but every channel you can. So this is widely known in China and worldwide, and you have to keep hammering that. This potentially could put the Chinese on the back foot in their cognitive warfare efforts against us and may cause them to, as I say, back off a bit. In all the years I've been following China, the most angry I have seen their leadership is when in 2012, Bloomberg and New York Times wrote an expose of the wealth of some of the top leaders, including Xi's family, and the Chinese were furious about this. And I've never seen anything like it. And more recently, there was actually a similar report as the current one that's being supposedly written, that was done by the intelligence community and the State Department. And it was ordered in 2003, it came out a year late, and it was really nine pages of gibberish. But when the report was going to be announced, it was going to be written. The Chinese embassy was calling around town in Washington, saying, don't do this. And it gives you a sense of just how sensitive an issue this is. But the key point is, what do you do with it once you get the information? Do you use it to, say, embarrass Xi Jinping to sort of build a groundswell of sort of jealousy slash anger in China? Are you willing to do that? Or are you afraid of getting Xi Jinping angry, and thus he may not cooperate in another summit meeting? Well, if you're afraid of that, well, you're going to lose, and you're going to squander really a wonderful opportunity to for once sort of strike a blow for the good guys. And of course, the Chinese will complain. But all you have to say really is, well, we're just helping you get a handle on capital flight and money laundering that's poured out of China. You complain about corruption all the time. We're just helping you out with it. Xi Jinping has been going after what he calls corruption, ousting a lot of perhaps naysayers against him within the system. But when it comes to reporting on it, it's almost become a term, the Bloomberg model, where you see an outlet wanting access inside China and covering up certain stories or certain perspectives on different things. And with the recent ethnic unity law that just came into play on July 1st, there is a lot of concern, especially among journalists about what that means to what you report. In Taiwan, there's been a lot of legal scholars looking into that, because just being Taiwanese or saying you identify as Taiwanese is a crime under that law because of how vague it is, and that China could perhaps prosecute people beyond its borders, even here in America for the journalist type, or just anyone that speaks critically about the party. Given all of that and what you just laid out in terms of reporting on something that could actually hurt the party, what would be your advice to those people who are either concerned about their own well-being or losing access to a lot of money when it comes to China? Well, at some point, you've got to have some sense of decency. My experience actually with our financial class and much of our business class is that they've lost it. When they smell Chinese money, they will just contort themselves and rationalize anything, no matter how bad or horrific, just so they can get a chunk of Chinese cash. So there's really not much you can say other than have you no decency. And the answer, I think, in many cases is not really. But nonetheless, you keep hammering this home. And at some point, there's going to reach a limit. And people will have to say, look, we can't deal with this evil regime anymore. And it shows you, though, how effective the Chinese have been at getting sort of otherwise normal and sort of really decent Americans to sort of sacrifice their standards, and to actually handcuff themselves, to restrain themselves, because they don't want you to get China mad at them, and they will lose access, they will lose money. And that's been very effective. But at some point, people are going to have to ask themselves, what are we doing? Is it right? And ultimately, if the idea is we're going to come to blows with China, well, are you going to help build up the Chinese Communist Party so that it can kill young Americans? The answer seems to be yes, in too many cases, but that can change. And I'm not just talking about business, sort of commercial businesses, academia is just as bad, and our political class as well. You ask yourself, what have they done to punish China for fentanyl? The answer is nothing, even though it's killed well over 800,000 Americans. They haven't done a thing. So there's plenty of blame to go around. And there are good people trying to do something about this. I'd cite Representative John Molnar of the China Select Committee, Neil Dunn from Florida. There's some very good people. Grant, you shouldn't miss all this. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. That's all for today's China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. If you have any feedback on the show or have something you'd like to see us cover, send us an email at chinainfocusatntd.com. We'd love to hear from you. For on the clock original news coverage, visit us at ntd.com or download our NTD app. Thanks for watching. See you tomorrow.