U.S. Suspends Visa Free Travel Program for Chinese Nationals | China in Focus

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Our top story, a visa loophole that Chinese have exploited for years to enter the U.S. now closed. How easy access to Northern Mariana Islands could facilitate birth tourism and espionage. A federal judge ruling the Pentagon can't refuse to do business with companies that hire the same lobbyists as Alibaba. What does it mean for the Chinese tech giant's lobbying push on Capitol Hill? China-linked ships could get a two-month extension on the suspension of additional fees for using U.S. ports. This would give the U.S. and China more time to negotiate over China's dominance in global shipbuilding. The U.S. finally closes a loophole the Chinese have been exploiting for years. The Department of Homeland Security announced that starting from October 30th, it's halting a visa waiver to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands called the Economic Vitality and Security Travel Authorization Program, or ESV-TAP for short. A commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, also known as CNMI, is a self-governing commonwealth in association with the U.S. in the Pacific. It's near the U.S. territory of Guam, which serves as a critical military logistics hub between the U.S. mainland and the Indo-Pacific. Both CNMI and Guam are critical in the event kinetic war breaks out between the U.S. and China, especially since the Department of War is restoring Tinian Air Base in CNMI. But there's a problem. CNMI allowed Chinese citizens to enter without requiring a visa. Proponents for this argued it was vital for CNMI's tourism industry, even though Korean tourists outnumbered the Chinese. But Chinese citizens can just use ESV-TAP as a means to enter U.S. territory and engage in illicit activities, including Chinese birth tourism, human trafficking, and even espionage. One such criminal was caught precisely because of using ESV-TAP. So this is a guy, started off with the visa waiver, sold meth, brought in birth tourism, was involved in a murder. None of that was caught in the U.S. That was only caught once he was in Palau, and then now he's in jail. Other Chinese nationals have also been caught using the visa waiver to engage in suspicious activities. This includes a case where a number of Chinese were smuggled from CNMI to Guam and were caught near sensitive military installations. A federal judge ruling Monday the Pentagon can't refuse to do businesses with companies that hire the same lobbyists as Alibaba, a Chinese tech giant that the Pentagon has designated as tied to the Chinese military. The ruling means Alibaba will be able to keep U.S. lobbyists who also represent Pentagon contractors. The Chinese tech giant used to have over two dozen lobbyists who pushed its interests on Capitol Hill. Following the designation, some of its lobbyists quit. Judge Yumi Lee ruled the Pentagon failed to provide specific evidence that allowing Alibaba to choose its own lobbyists would threaten U.S. interests. Alibaba, drone maker DJI, and subsidiaries of BYD have sued the Pentagon over the military company designation. The U.S. is considering whether to keep port fees targeting China-linked vessels on hold for another two months. This would give the two countries more time to negotiate over China's dominant role in the shipbuilding industry. The U.S. government introduced the port fees in October 2025, defining China-linked vessels broadly to include ships built in China, as well as ships owned or operated by Chinese companies. In response, shipping companies tried to steer clear of vessels that fell under those categories. Later, as part of a broader trade deal, Washington and Beijing decided to suspend the fees for one year, starting November 10th last year. If the fees had remained in effect, the two major China-controlled shipping companies, COSCO and OCL, could have faced more than $2 billion in additional costs so far. The U.S. trade representative is accepting public comments over this issue through October 30th. Europe's top 10 luxury firms lost $350 billion in value this year. The two largest luxury firms, LVMH and Hermes, were the hardest hit, and much of it thanks to sluggish sales in China. The luxury industry had hoped that Chinese consumers would choose to spend more money, but Chinese consumers are doing the exact opposite. China is currently undergoing economic difficulties that are discouraging Chinese people from spending their hard-earned cash. Weak consumption, in turn, is part of the reason why Chinese stock markets are declining. Chinese businesses across various industries, including EVs and AI, are struggling to make the kinds of returns that investors expect. Making matters worse is China's ongoing struggle to recover from its real estate crash, which took with it so much of Chinese people's wealth. Hermes' chief financial officer linked Hermes' poor performance to the Chinese stock market as well as China's crackdown on offshore wealth. U.S. consumers, especially high-end spenders, have helped sustain the luxury industry earlier this year. But in more recent months, overall U.S. spending on luxury has declined as uncertainty over the midterms looms over consumers' and businesses' minds. Coming up, the Pentagon designated China's Confucius Institute as a national security threat. But do these programs actually do? And what's the problem of having them on U.S. campuses? That and more after the break. Welcome back to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. The Pentagon designating China's Confucius Institutes as a national security threat. Former Secretary Pete Hegseth says it's a CCP-backed propaganda program that has infiltrated American universities. and the Pentagon has dismantled every single one of these organizations. Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli joined NTD's Steve Lanz to unpack what's at stake. Ken Cuccinelli, thanks so much for joining. My pleasure. Ken, the Department of War designating Confucius Institutes, which are backed by the Chinese Communist Party, a national security threat. Here's Secretary Hegseth on how the department is responding. At the Department of War, within the last two months, we have systematically dismantled every single one of these organizations using the leverage that we have here at the War Department. Let this be a lesson to any country trying to steal our hard-earned inventions or turn our young people against their own country. We're done with that. Ken, you heard it from the Secretary. Many countries, including the United States, promote cultural exchanges. for viewers at home who are unfamiliar with the Confucius Institutes these sort of they label themselves as cultural exchanges but they're actually spy operations talk to us about what's at stake for Americans with this type of so they're even more comprehensive than that the spying I think is opportunistic the spying actually comes after their more strategic national goals These Confucius Institutes make arrangements with higher education colleges, universities in America, and they, unlike other cultural exchanges, obtain veto power over hiring and firing decisions at the university. And the universities, almost without exception, clamp up on any criticism of China. They tamp down parts of the university that might be criticizing China. And this is really very old. This is not a new problem. And I would also note, so I'm a University of Virginia graduate, a public university. if the University of Virginia has an agreement with pick a university in China to set up a Confucius Institute well every entity in communist China works for communist China and so that is an agreement and the University of Virginia is an entity of the Commonwealth of Virginia now if you look at article 1 section 10 of your constitution you'll recall in the compacts clause that states can't enter into agreements with foreign powers. Well, that's what's happening with public universities all over the country and the Communist Party of China. They're entering into unconstitutional agreements that give them a say at American universities. Ken, what interests do the universities have to keep these programs going? Well, they're communists too. So, I mean, let's just be blunt about it, right? They ideologically align better with the Communist Party of China, typically, than they do with the United States of America and our history. So let's not minimize that possibility. That doesn't mean they want to bleed out American intellectual property to China. If you ask them directly, they'd probably say no, but they've created the opportunity for that to happen, And they've made it a whole lot easier for China to take those sorts of aggressive steps, knowing full well that the university isn't going to do anything to slap them down or contain them. They've already, they now, Communist China, have already conditioned the university not to do exactly that. I think to your point, obviously, the Chinese Communist Party, a Marxist-Leninist regime, we've seen Marxist ideology incubating in these universities. The Secretary mentioned how Congress has restricted these Confucius Institutes, yet they've crept back in under different names. And it's not just pro-CCP propaganda that they're putting out there. There's disinformation campaigns to divide America. Well, not only that, and rewrite history, for example, you can't talk about Tiananmen Square at any of these universities. Note, I don't just say the Confucius Institute, that if the prospect of anyone talking about Tiananmen Square arises, the Chinese government will come in very quietly and remind the university of the relationship and basically lean on them to stop that. They censor speech at these universities very actively that has anything to do with China or, flip it, Taiwan. If you want to do something favorably, having a discussion or an interchange or exchange with the Taiwanese university or have a discussion about the prospects of China invading Taiwan, they're going to weigh in. And they're not going to do it overtly. They're going to do it quietly. that's part of the value to China of establishing these institutes and these relationships on the front end, is they get censorship levers, not just about what's said, but about our own history and theirs. Ken, switching gears a bit here, 10 non-citizens just arrested for voter fraud in North Carolina. This says millions of Americans have already cast their votes in early voting in our country. Each person in this report, Ken, charged with falsely claiming citizenship to register that's when you wrap your head around that that's that's just this is just one case how widespread is this and how confident are you in the security of our elections in this midterm cycle so the raw numbers of people on the voter rolls who don't belong in the voter rolls is very high it's very high it's part of why things like the federal SAVE Act are so important because confirming citizenship has really been muddied up by federal case law and federal law itself, states can't fix that. Only the federal government can fix the federal government's mistakes. And so the SAVE Act was intended to do a lot of those things and to beef up voter ID requirements. I can tell you as a former prosecutor, having been the attorney general in Virginia, it is a thousand times more difficult to prosecute a voter fraud case than to stop it. That's why voter ID is so important. That's why citizenship screening at the point of registration is so important. You all reported not too long ago on the over 6,000 non-citizens registered to vote in New Jersey in just one year, from the summer of 23 to the summer of 24, and hundreds of them in that one year voted. so that's a blue state that doesn't want us to know about it and and we're literally talking about six thousand people in just one year registering to vote it poses a real concern and a real threat to our elections of course the best way to deal with it if you're a candidate and i've been a candidate too is win by a lot i mean but there are a lot of races that that doesn't happen former virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli thanks so much for joining us good to be with you, as always. Recent incidents involving rogue AI swarms breaking out of testing environments to hack other companies and even targeting U.S. government websites have many worried. What is this superintelligence that AI companies are racing to develop, and could things get out of hand? American Thought Leader's host, Anya Kallik sat down with Nate Sars for his take. Sars is the president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and co-author of if anyone builds it, everyone dies, why superhuman AI would kill us all. Let's dive in. A couple of things I want to mention at the outset. I feel there's several irreconcilable issues when you kind of add them up, and I don't know the answer. And I'm going to want to sort of look at this as we go throughout the interview. The first one is it feels like there absolutely needs to be some kind of regulation around this, because, you know, unbridled movement towards super intelligence doesn't make any sense i know you're i know you're very on board with that one but at the same time there's kind of credible evidence i see of some of the big boys in the field looking to create that regulation that will kind of favor them over other developments as well and that seems like a very bad idea we don't need more cronyism kind of in the system that would probably create a whole series of of problems and then of course there's the question of communist China which is sort of putting all its all of its uh eggs in the basket of panopticon totalitarian rule through super intelligence uh and also you know fixing its demographic well it has all sorts of all sorts of things it needs to correct so it's unlikely they're going to slow down and i just don't know the answer to this so this is this is this colors our discussion so just as a starting point right i want to understand when people talk about super intelligence right um what what are we what are we really talking about so there's there's a few different things uh that people mean by it and and they often get them conflated um the so terms that would be used in the field is uh we would talk about artificial general intelligence which is about uh machines that can solve a lot of problems very well. So back in the 90s, you know, there were chess playing machine intelligences that could sort of only play computer chess, but they could play that at a superhuman level. And so you might say, well, are they smarter than humans? And while they're smarter than humans at chess, but they can't, you know, drive a car to the store to get some milk. And so a general intelligence was the idea of an AI that can do lots of different things. Now we have these large language models, which can sort of do lots of different things. They can write code, they can write poetry, They can write, you know, kids' essays for their homework problems. They can solve math problems. And some of those that can do better than humans, some of them that can do worse. In some ways, they still seem kind of dumb. And so you could say that in many ways they're general intelligences, but they're not superhuman across the board. And what these AI companies are racing towards is something that the AI companies previously called superintelligence superintelligence that now maybe we'll need to call something like ultraintelligence in the sense of I.J. Good, who was one of the first computer scientists who spoke of ultraintelligent machines that were machines capable of doing the work of creating even smarter machines. And he was speaking about this in the 50s, and he said, this is the last invention that humanity will need to make because once you have made machines that can do the process of inventing, they can invent the smarter machines. This is the recursive self-development that we hear about. That's right and so uh we could say an ultra intelligent machine is a machine that is uh more capable than the smartest human at every mental task across the board and this is what the companies are racing towards and um once you have ais that can make smarter as they can make smarter ais things can get out of hand very quickly i'm gonna quote something you wrote very recently and i want you to expand on this for me you said each ai ceo has their ego built around them being the only guy who can do the job right the data looks grim and their employees are spooked now they seek the minimum change that lets them rationalize proceeding to themselves and their staff yeah a lot of people say hey is this uh talk of extinction is it hype is an attempt at regulatory capture what's really going on here? And I have a lot of thoughts on that. The first thing I would say is that I would not ask anyone to trust the CEOs of these companies when they come in saying that their technology is dangerous. The reasons that I have for thinking the tech is dangerous are about the computer science. They're about the theoretical arguments that we've had for years, that I've been arguing for years, and the practical data that we have seen come in over time, including just this summer where we had cases of swarms breaking out of OpenAI. And I see a lot of people say, hey, are these companies just trying to do regulatory capture? Are they just trying to hype up their product or drive up the price before their IPO or explain the price falling before their IPO? And I would sort of ask people, ignore the CEOs. Look at the data. Look at the arguments. Our first question has to be, is this stuff really dangerous? And then once you have that answer, And I think the answer is that this stuff is really dangerous. You then have this question of, you know, why are these CEOs acting so weaselly in front of cameras? Why are they, you know, saying, oh, we need some regulation. We need to be regulated like a bank. When a bank when a bank goes wrong, it does not kill everybody in the world. Right. And so there's this sort of weird thing going on with their communications, where their employees will come out on X and say, there's a 10% plus chance that this kills everybody inside of the decade. And then the corporate executives will go on CNN and say, oh, well, maybe if we don't do anything, there's a chance like that, but give us one embedded regulator and let us keep racing. And I think a lot of people are having trouble rationalizing or understanding what's going on with the CEO communications. And that's where I sort of come in with this view of like, well, I think that they really want to race ahead. If you look at the history of these companies, all of these companies are sort of created in opposition to other companies where they're worried about what happens if that guy gets the technology first. And, you know, they'll say they're worried about China, but really, you know, Dario is worried about Sam Altman is worried about Elon Musk is worried about also Sam Altman. And they're all worried about Demis Hassabis at Google. And they're all sort of like worried about each other. And so I think it's a combination of that plus being worried about retaining their employees, who are the ones who have been trying to make these AIs behave a certain way, watching those techniques fail, and then getting very worried. 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 [email protected]. 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.