The U.S. ordered the Chinese consulate in Houston, Texas, shut down because of the persistent problem of Bejing’s theft of American intellectual property, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday.US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo looks on during a press conference in Eigtved’s Warehouse, in Copenhagen Wednesday July 22, 2020.“We are setting out clear expectations as to how the Chinese Communist Party is going to behave,” the top U.S. diplomat said at a news conference in Denmark. 
 
“And when they don’t, we are going to take actions that protect the American people, protect our security, our national security, and also protect our economy and jobs,” he said. 
 
China was given until Friday afternoon to close the Houston facility, which has about 60 employees. The U.S. order was a sharp escalation of recent fraying relations between the United States, the world’s biggest economy, and No. 2 China. 
 
The directive came a day after U.S. President Donald Trump acknowledged that the coronavirus pandemic that originated in China is likely to get worse in the United States before it gets better.The number of coronavirus cases is surging in the U.S. to an average of 66,000 a day over the last week, and the number of deaths, now topping 142,000, is rising again to more than 900 a day after slowing in recent weeks.  FILE – Emergency Medical Technicians (EMT) arrive with a patient while a funeral car begins to depart at North Shore Medical Center where the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) patients are treated, in Miami, Florida, July 14, 2020.Pompeo said China’s Houston operations had a wide effect. 
 
“It’s not just American intellectual property that is stolen,” he said. “It’s been European intellectual property, too, costing hundreds of thousands of jobs, good jobs for hard-working people all across Europe and America, stolen by the Chinese Communist Party.” 
 
He said that President Trump “has said ‘enough.’ We’re not going to allow this to continue to happen.…” 
 
One key Republican lawmaker, Senator Marco Rubio, said the Chinese consulate in Houston “is not a diplomatic facility. It is the central node of the Communist Party’s vast network of spies & influence operations in the United States. 
 
“This needed to happen” Rubio declared. 
 
There are six other Chinese diplomatic missions in the U.S.: its embassy in Washington, an office at the United Nations and consulates in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Chicago.  FILE – U.S. President Donald Trump meets with China’s President Xi Jinping at the start of their bilateral meeting at the G-20 leaders summit in Osaka, Japan, June 29, 2019.While Trump has often praised Chinese President Xi Jinping, tensions between the two countries have increased in the midst of the pandemic and China’s security crackdown on protests in Hong Kong, which the U.S. and its Western allies have deplored. The U.S. has issued new travel rules for diplomats and also required some Chinese state news organizations to register as diplomatic entities. 
 
Two Chinese nationals were charged Tuesday with hacking hundreds of entities around the world, including U.S. biotech companies developing COVID-19 vaccines and treatments, while working with China’s security services. 
 
China strenuously objected to the U.S. order to close the Houston consulate and threatened retaliation. 
 
Speaking to reporters in Beijing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the U.S. directive “is an unprecedented escalation of its recent actions against China.” He accused the United States of harassing Chinese diplomatic and consular staff, as well as “intimidating and interrogating Chinese students and confiscating their personal electrical devices” and even going so far as to detain them.   
 
Wang warned that if the Trump administration did not have a change of heart, China would retaliate. A firetruck is positioned outside the Chinese Consulate, July 22, 2020, in Houston.Hours after the order was issued, local Houston television station KPRC broadcast footage of smoke billowing from a courtyard inside the consulate, with fire trucks stationed on the street outside. Houston police said consular staffers were burning documents in open containers in preparation of being evicted, but local authorities did not enter the diplomatic facility. 
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Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike Wednesday asked residents to stay home over Japan’s upcoming four-day summer holiday weekend as confirmed COVID-19 cases have been surging in the capital.At a news briefing, Koike said the city has topped 10,000 total cases. She said that, while there would need to be scientific analysis to say whether or not the city is experiencing a second wave of the virus, she recommended everyone prepare for it.Tokyo reported 238 new cases Wednesday, down from last Friday’s record 293 daily cases, but still over 200 for the second day.  The city has seen triple-digit new cases for all but two days in July.Looking toward the upcoming long weekend, Koike said she would like Tokyo residents, especially older people and those with pre-existing conditions, to “refrain from going out as much as possible.” Japan will begin a four-day weekend on Thursday. The holiday had been established for the now-postponed Olympic games, which were to have started Friday.Japan has never had a total lockdown but officials asked businesses to close and people to work from home in a state of emergency starting in April, that was gradually lifted recently.     Japan has around 26,000 confirmed coronavirus cases, and about 1,000 deaths.Last Friday’s 293 daily cases is the highest for Tokyo since the pandemic started in China and spread to Japan late last year.
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In Malaysia, like much of the world, coronavirus infections began rocketing in early March and eventually topped 8,800. By early June daily caseloads had fallen to around 10 to 20 and they’ve never resurged.   Coronavirus infections in the United States also began a steep climb in early March but instead of falling in June surged upwards to some of the country’s worst ever.   Shoppers wearing face masks to help curb the spread of the coronavirus walk through a shopping mall in downtown in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, July 20, 2020.Malaysia is just the latest success story in East Asia. Most of its neighbors have stopped the spread on COVID-19 because of several advantages missing in the United States, analysts say. Asians proactively protect one another from disease and trust government officials, who in turn take seriously the risk of respiratory disease spilling over from China.   “I think it’s cultural,” said Alan Chong, associate professor at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.   “People here are still collectivist in orientation of thought, meaning even if a certain government is despised, they will still listen to instructions especially if they are reasonable,” Chong said. “The idea of stay at home, people will obey because the collective good is explained to them in a self-evident way.”   The two sides of the Pacific Ocean might normally go separate ways, but in April U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo described the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations as “strategic partners” in responding to COVID-19 and called for collaboration.   FILE – Vietnamese Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, background, addresses ASEAN leaders during the Special ASEAN summit on COVID-19 in Hanoi, Vietnam, April 14, 2020.In mid-July the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee vice chairman expressed appreciation to the Southeast Asian bloc for sharing “lessons and experiences” in controlling the disease, Asian media outlets reported. U.S. President Donald Trump had thanked the Vietnamese prime minister in May for supplying medical gear and giving facemasks to the United States.   Americans have defied stay-at-home orders and urged their removal, sparking new waves of infections since June. Some citizens of the country still avoid facemasks. Trump called the mouth covers “patriotic” only this week, after months of resistance.   Confucianism, a cultural force in East Asia that advocates duty to society over individual needs, has been cited to explain Asian responses to COVID-19 and lack of cohesion in the United States, according to March 31 blog post by the Wilson Center policy forum.   In Hong Kong, antigovernment protesters active over the past year suspend their activities when virus cases rise as they have over the past month.   FILE – Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen waves after inspecting the military police headquarters in Taipei on May 26, 2020.Taiwanese regularly wear facemasks in public even though COVID-19 shows no sign of community transmission. Taiwan’s health minister Chen Shih-chung was so respected for his handling of the virus this year that citizens crafted pop-up cartoons and doll-sized effigies in his image.   Ethnic Malay cultures in Malaysia and Indonesia promote banding together against common threats, Chong said.   Within a week of Malaysia declaring its lockdown, some 95% of the population had complied with the order, said Ibrahim Suffian, program director with the polling group Merdeka Center in Kuala Lumpur.   “I think many Malaysians wouldn’t be able to understand what goes on in the minds of many Americans, because I think in the case of Malaysia the trust in the experts and trust in the bureaucracy is still relatively high, whereas perhaps in the U.S. there’s this issue of trust in government,” Suffian said.   “Most people didn’t question, and in fact most people felt the government lifted the lockdown too early,” he said.   Governments in Asia need not always remind people to wear masks, keep distance and stay home. A student is scanned for temperature before entering Dinh Cong secondary school in Hanoi, Vietnam, May 4, 2020. “It’s not just that the commander in chief orders that everyone wears a mask,” said Frederick Burke, Ho Chi Minh City-based partner with the law firm Baker McKenzie. In Vietnam, he said, “it’s a mentality. People have to protect each other, it’s not to protect yourself, the mask, it’s to protect others in case you’re a carrier.”   Vietnam has reported just 401 coronavirus cases and no deaths.  “Maybe they’re sweeping some things under the rug, but in general those numbers have been demonstrated to be accurate,” said Derek Grossman, senior analyst with the Rand Corp. research institution in the United States. Some Americans suspect that Vietnam as a communist state suppressed freedoms to stop COVID-19 and covered up caseload data.   Like peers in much of East Asia, Vietnamese officials also reacted in early 2020 by curtailing visitors and tracing the contacts of sick people. China, where the coronavirus was discovered, came under particular scrutiny among border nations.   Authorities in Malaysia learned too from experience controlling the SARS atypical pneumonia outbreak in 2003 and the H1N1 flu six years later, Suffian said. China was an early transmitter of both diseases. Taiwan, Singapore and South Korea learned from the same.   The U.S. government saw COVID-19 before it exploded in the country but didn’t move to stop it, the Wilson Center blog post says. One government health agency had been defunded and another disbanded, it notes. In Asia, the post says, experts convinced their governments to act after SARS. 
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