Welcome to Foreign PolicyOverview of China.
Highlights this week: US President Donald Trump is increasing his claims China’s birth tourismChinese President Xi Jinping to promote two military officersand China tests a long-range missile.
Welcome to Foreign PolicyOverview of China.
Highlights this week: US President Donald Trump is increasing his claims China’s birth tourismChinese President Xi Jinping to promote two military officersand China tests a long-range missile.
Denying Trump’s Birth Tour Claims
The U.S. Supreme Court’s rejection of the Trump administration’s bid to revoke birthright citizenship has reignited a familiar conflict of racist fears: U.S. President Donald Trump and other Republicans he suggested that so-called birth tourism from China is a government-backed scheme to plant foreign agents on American soil.
Although birth tourism—in which a foreign-born mother travels to the United States to give birth to a child who does not remain a US resident—is technically illegal, it is a real industry. But it is nowhere near as big as critics make it be.
There is no official data on birth tourism, but at its peak in 2015, it is estimated that it represented less than 0.3 percent of all births in the United States. In recent years, some 7,000 to 9,000 Birth tourism events occurred every year in the United States, most of which were children born to Hispanic mothers, most of them from Mexico.
Of these, births to non-resident Chinese mothers in the United States are estimated at low hundreds every year. Another small group consists of Chinese women with long-term visas, mainly students, who spend many years in the United States. About 27,000 babies a year are born to mothers who themselves were born in China, but most of those mothers are US citizens or permanent residents.
Number of births undocumented immigrants is higher than the tourism birth rate—about 9 percent of U.S. births in 2023—but also heavily represented by Hispanic mothers. Many undocumented Chinese immigrants are doing everything possible to avoid returning to China, and many have spouses who are US citizens or lawful permanent residents.
Planning to give birth in the US as a non-resident is very difficult. Many airlines refuse carry women in the last weeks of pregnancy, and US visa officers constant rejection entry of visibly pregnant applicants unless there is a genuine medical need. Giving birth in the United States therefore generally requires obtaining a long-term B-2 visa before the pregnancy becomes apparent.
There was once a loophole: Visa-free travel to the Northern Mariana Islands was allowed for wealthy Chinese citizens relatively easy access to the US region. There was an increase in foreign births in 2018, and 574 foreign nationals –it seems almost all from Mainland China—they breed in that area. The loophole was largely closed by reducing the visa-free stay from 45 days to 14 days and introducing additional screening, resulting in fewer foreign child deaths.
As a result, US birth tourism is restricted almost exclusively to the wealthy, who can afford the high costs and uncertainty. It is also sometimes connected for surrogacy, that is against the law in China. Chinese corporations can payment anywhere from $36,000 to $100,000 for birthday tourism “vacation packages” to the United States.
But the idea that this birth tourism industry is a Chinese government conspiracy is ridiculous—especially because Beijing openly opposes it. After all, for many wealthy Chinese families, American citizenship represents an insurance policy against a government that can imprison them arbitrarily or destroy their business all night.
These wealthy elites spend a lot of effort trying move overseas assets despite strict capital controls and often seek foreign residency or visas if they need to leave China permanently. Acquiring US citizenship for a child provides, at the very least, a safe haven for the next generation.
One especially nonsense the idea is that China will use US-born children to infiltrate the US government. That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the United States security clearance processwhere even second-generation Chinese Americans with family remaining in China are suspect. Someone raised in China with few real ties to America would have no real chance of receiving it.
Republican fears about China’s birth tourism show how legitimate concerns about Chinese espionage and Beijing’s growing influence can veer into racism. Chinese Americans often have the language skills and cultural knowledge that the US government needs to understand China. They are potential assets, not liabilities. Most importantly, they are Americans entitled to the same rights and equal treatment as every other citizen.
What we’re after
Generals are promoted. Chinese President Xi Jinping has done just that to be raised two military officers, Zhang Shuguang and Wang Gang, to the rank of general. Zhang was also appointed head of the Disciplinary Inspection Commission of the Central Military Commission, putting him in charge of anti-corruption efforts.
China’s military leadership has been undermined by successive political withdrawals, as I’ve written before. Zhang, a political commissar whose work has been used in the so-called disciplinary reviewit appears to have been set up to continue Xi’s purge and oversee the formalization of the leadership group before the Supreme Military Commission is announced next year.
Ironically, many of the generals purged last year were promoted by Xi for the same reasons, replacing the previous generation who were thrown out for corruption in 2013, after Xi assumed the presidency.
Long-range missile launch. On Monday, China conducted long-range missile test in the Pacific, causing alarm among nearby island nations. The Solomon Islands prime minister condemned the attempt, saying it was “not something a friend does.” Beijing gave little notice of the test.
The launch appears to be aimed at demonstrating China’s second nuclear capability to the United States. Like the Soviet Union during the Cold War, China is building a nuclear deterrent based on the ability of its submarines to survive an initial strike and retaliate against the US mainland.
Most Read FP This Week
Technology and Business
AI propaganda. Nieman Lab’s investigation in unusually modern A fake news operation has revealed an interesting Chinese connection. The website, theeditorial.news, presented itself as a comprehensive journal Editorialand at least one of his stories–the claim that a free press in Alabama was effectively dead–widespread online.
But the site, which has been taken offline, appeared entirely artificial intelligence. Many of his stories criticized US relations with Taiwan or supported China’s claims in the South China Sea. The operation appears to have used unrelated stories to provide cover for what was ultimately a propaganda effort.
Ironically, the popularity of the article about Alabama ended up exposing the site.
Counting problems. China’s surge in AI adoption is putting a huge strain on computing resources, and at least one company. raise its cloud service prices and other processing power components by more than 430 percent.
Consumer AI needs are becoming increasingly complex, with the average query now requiring five times as many tokens—the units of data that generative AI models use to understand input and process output—as it did a year ago.
That makes China AI price war even more important. Companies continue to lose money, but capital continues to pour into the industry in the belief that the winners will eventually dominate the trillion-dollar industry.
