News Analysis

BEIJING -- There was confusion at the China-North Korea border Thursday after Chinese tour operators halted trips into the North.

Wang Zhao / AFP - Getty Images

Two men wait Thursday for dispatch at a customs port in the Chinese border city of Dandong. The largest border crossing between North Korea and China has been closed to tourist groups, a Chinese official said Wednesday.

It wasn't clear whether the instruction to do so came from the Chinese authorities, the North Koreans, or was made by the nervous operators themselves.

But it mirrored a wider confusion over Chinese policy toward Pyongyang, which depends on Beijing for food and fuel, as well as diplomatic support.

As North Korea readies what is thought to be a missile test, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei has spent most of the week deflecting questions with the official line that "all sides" should show restraint and begin dialogue, and that peace and stability are a "shared responsibility."

But in an interview with NBC News he was more forthright about China's growing concern. "We do not want to see chaos and conflict on China's doorstep," he said.

In fact, there are signs that China is rethinking its policy toward the North. President Xi Jinping last weekend told a forum of political and business leaders that no country "should be allowed to throw a region and even the whole world into chaos for selfish gain." He didn't mention the North by name, but it was pretty clear who he was referring to.

Earlier, China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi had told UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that Beijing would not allow "troublemaking on China's doorstep," a line repeated in an editorial in Thursday's China Daily.

China also supported the latest UN sanctions that followed North Korea's third nuclear test.

In fact, relations between the two have been souring for some time as Pyongyang has consistently ignored calls by Beijing for restraint.

"To many in Beijing, North Korea is looking less like a strategic asset and more like a strategic burden," said Cheng Xiaohe, associate professor at Renmin University's School of International Studies.

In the past, even when clearly unhappy, Beijing has treated the North with kid gloves because of fear of the North collapsing, and also as a hedge against U.S. power in Asia.

'Little Fatty'
According to leaked 2010 diplomat cables obtained by Wikileaks and posted by newspapers the Guardian and the New York Times, Chinese officials described the regime in the North as behaving like a "spoiled child."

Slideshow: North Korea's young leader, Kim Jong Un

The youngest son of Kim Jong Il succeeded his late father in 2011, becoming the third member of his family to rule the unpredictable and reclusive communist state.

Launch slideshow

Chinese social media, which is as close a barometer of public opinion as you can get here, has in recent days been buzzing with criticism -- not of the U.S., but of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, for leading his country to disaster and the world close to war.

Kim is derided as "Little Fatty" or "Fatty the Third."

One former top U.S. diplomat agrees there are clear signs that China is losing patience with North Korea. Kurt Campbell, the state department's top official for east asia, said there are signs that a relationship once described by Chairman Mao to be "as close as lips and teeth" is wearing thin.

He said this was notable in public statements and private conversations with U.S. officials. Speaking last week at a forum at Johns Hopkins University, he said this had the potential for a large impact on northeast Asia.

What's harder to say is how this growing frustration will be translated into concrete actions to pressure the North.

Cheng of Renmin University noted that in 2003 Beijing turned off the oil supply in order to force Pyongyang to join six-party talks and could use that weapon again.

"If China has political will, China can do something," he said. "China can make a difference."

Secretary of State John Kerry will be taking this up with China's leaders when he is there this weekend.

"China and the U.S. share common interests in peace, stability and denuclearisation," said the Foreign Ministry's Hong Lei. "We hope to work with the U.S. side towards that end."

Significantly, there has so far been no Chinese criticism of the display of U.S. high-tech firepower in the region, which is seen as another tacit condemnation of Pyongyang's antics.

That said, Kerry will no doubt point out, as other officials have done privately, that if China fails to act the result will be an even bigger U.S. military presence in the region and a possible regional arms race -- precisely what China has said it wants to avoid.

Related:

US on missile watch as North Korea celebrates

Full North Korea coverage from NBC News

Slideshow: Glimpses into the hermit kingdom of North Korea

David Guttenfelder / AP

As chief Asia photographer for the Associated Press, David Guttenfelder has had unprecedented access to communist North Korea. Here's a rare look at daily life in the secretive country.

Launch slideshow

Ashwini Bhatia / AP

Exiled Tibetan Buddhist monks walk past a banner of photos of Tibetan protesters as they participate in a candlelit vigil organized by the Tibetan parliament in exile in Dharmsala, India, on Thursday.

Chinese authorities detained 70 people in ethnically Tibetan areas Thursday in a bid to crack down on the gruesome spectacle of people setting themselves on fire to protest Chinese rule, state media said.

The operation, the largest of its kind yet reported by Beijing, is part of an intensifying effort to quell the fiery protests. It comes on the heels of a documentary released in China that blames Westerners, particularly Voice of America, for encouraging people to set themselves on fire and then treating those who do as heroes.

Nearly 100 people have set themselves alight since 2009 to protest Chinese rule, and most of them have died from their injuries.

Twelve of the 70 people detained Thursday were officially arrested in connection with self-immolation cases in what China calls the Huangnan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture, Qinghai Province deputy police chief Lyu Bengqian said, according to state media.

Lyu is head of a special police team investigating self-immolation cases. He said efforts would be stepped up to investigate the protests and to "seriously punish" anyone seen as inciting them.

China blames the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader in exile, as well as the West for the increase in self-immolations.

The U.S. State Department has been critical of the recent arrests.

In her Feb. 1 news briefing, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland criticized China's Tibet policies, in particular the heavy sentencing in January of a Tibetan monk and his nephew, who were charged with inciting eight people to set themselves on fire.

"We continue both publicly and privately to urge the Chinese government at all levels to address policies in Tibet -- in Tibetan areas -- that have created tensions and that threaten the distinct religious, cultural and linguistic identity of the Tibetan people."

On Wednesday, Voice of America shot back at China's assertion that it had encouraged Tibetans to set themselves on fire.

"That is totally false," Voice of America Director David Ensor said in a news release. "We do report these tragic stories; we do not encourage these self-immolations, that is wrong."

CCTV, the Chinese state broadcaster, produced and aired a documentary that pointed fingers at Voice of America, which is the U.S. government's official broadcaster overseas.

The program showed a Tibetan man in a hospital bed who allegedly attempted to self-immolate.

Apparently prompted to explain why he had attempted to light himself on fire, the man said, "I did it after watching VOA, I saw the photographs of self-immolators being commemorated. They were treated like heroes."

The documentary also sensationally accuses VOA of employing secret codes to send messages to people inside Tibet.

"That is one of the more amazing parts of the CCTV report," Ensor said. "That suggestion is totally absurd."

VOA is asking that both CCTV and the China Daily retract their reports.

Related:

Documentary alleges US broadcaster incites self-immolations

Resounding silence as Chinese dissident wins US award

BEIJING – Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once wrote that the more laws and order are made prominent, the more thieves and robbers there will be.

He probably never imagined on just how big a scale that belief would be proven true today.

AP Photo/File

A recent People's Bank of China report this week announced that an estimated $123 billion dollars has been embezzled by corrupt Chinese officials over the last two decades. It is believed that between 16,000 and 18,000 officials were responsible for the graft.

In an astounding new report released by the People’s Bank of China, it was reported that since the mid-1990’s, between 16,000 and 18,000 corrupt Chinese government employees and executives of state-owned enterprises have fled the country with assets estimated at $123 billion.

The report comes as China this week has been gearing up to celebrate the 90^th anniversary of the founding of the ruling Communist party.

According to the study, the government employees came under a broad range of positions from judicial and police officers to executives and managers of Chinese state-owned companies and institutions. Equally wide ranging was the means by which the money was brought out of the country with the report citing offenders carrying out sophisticated bank transfers, forging fake contracts or sending relatives or mistresses abroad to buy property or assets. Still others simply carried cash out of the country in suitcases.

Where these officials and their ill-gained assets fled to was often decided by their position. The study found that the majority of the officials were relatively low-ranking, without the financial or political means to secure visas for western or more developed countries. Those officials opted then to escape to neighboring countries like Thailand, Burma, Russia and Mongolia. Still others float between countries in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, waiting for their chance to eventually immigrate to a more desirable nation.

So where was the preferred destination for the most well connected and criminally enriched? No other than the United States of America.

“It is of the lowest risk to be an official in China!”

The response online from Chinese netizens over the report was understandably livid. On Sina Weibo, the popular Chinese microblogging site, users fumed over the shocking numbers released. 

“There is no use to only monitor, there has to be political system reforms,” said one user, “The authority's power should be monitored to tackle the fundamental problem, otherwise the country will be completely robbed one day.”

Others took umbrage that the bank’s report would release such a detailed explanation on how these officials had safely embezzled the money, worried that other copycat officials would follow suit.

“Why did the report made it so clear how the transfer can be done? Do they actually want to tell those people that they have ‘eight ways to escape?’” wrote a user named “shoumairutun,” “Now those who did not previously know how to do this have learned how.”

Others though received the news with a degree of humor. Rui Cheng Gang, a well known CCTV journalist who is popularly followed online joked that the best way to catch these corrupt officials was to stakeout outside luxury stores, writing, “I suggest monitoring the areas in which luxury stores are located where the criminals will frequently appear. Ha!” 

Popular sentiment was probably best summed up though by a user named “qimiao,” who simply wrote, “It is of the lowest risk to be an official in China!”

U.S. just how safe a safe haven?

Numbers on just how many corrupt Chinese officials have fled to the United States are shaky at best. The U.S.-based Chinese language newspaper, World Journal, has previously reported that more than 1,000 officials are in the United States, predominantly in major metropolitan areas like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. 

Though the United States presently has no extradition treaties with China, in recent years the Justice Department has in certain instances repatriated Chinese nationals suspected of embezzlement.

Perhaps more promising, the Justice Department has cooperated with Chinese investigators in bringing some former officials to trial in the United States for their crimes. In August 2008, a US federal court in Las Vegas convicted two former Guangdong bank officials on counts of embezzlement, money laundering and passport fraud.

CCTV

Former Bank of China managers Xu Guojun (L) and Xu Chaofan (R), were found guilty in US federal court in Las Vegas. The 2008 case revolved around charges the two embezzled $485 million over a period of 10 years.

Known as the “Kaiping case,” the two defendants, Xu Chaofan and Xu Guojun and their families were accused of defrauding state bank, the Bank of China of $485 million over a period of 10 years.

The Xus, who had been managers at the Bank of China branch in Kaiping, Guangdong province had fled to the United States and been residing there for seven years before being indicted. Their successful prosecution was hailed in the local Chinese press as a big step towards greater Sino-US criminal judicial cooperation, with the China Daily at the time declaring it the “biggest case of its kind since the founding of New China in 1949.”

Last year the State Department reemphasized its willingness to assist China on similar cases involving embezzling officials and their families. After all, cooperation between the two countries not only familiarizes both parties with how each works, but it also allows U.S. officials a closer look at what is often times a quite opaque window into China’s financial and judicial process.

In recent years Communist party officials have consistently stressed the need to stamp out corruption, with President Hu Jintao even saying that it threatened the party’s very legitimacy. While the graft numbers are staggering, their release suggests at the very least the party’s willingness to acknowledge and hopefully begin the long process towards patching up these holes in regulation and enforcement.

AFP/File/Peter Parks

China's new rich are increasingly taking advantage of loopholes in American visa law to have their babies in the United States. Parents believe these so called "anchor babies" will have greater economic and educational advantages, but many are just beginning to see the problems that come with their status as well.

BEIJING – The question of children born of illegal immigrants - so-called “anchor babies” - was re-injected back into America’s national discourse late last year when a U.S. study found that an estimated 340,000 of 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 – or every 1 in 15 - had an illegal-immigrant parent.

While much of the debate – and a healthy dose of vitriol – was focused on immigrants of Hispanic background, stories of upper-class Chinese women flying to the United States in style and staying at private clinics to have their babies to take advantage of citizenship laws soon began to appear in the news cycle.       

With them, a new breed of anchor baby was born, and their very existence changed the dynamics of the controversy completely.

While Hispanic anchor babies might be stereotypically viewed as coming from poverty and consequently destined to be heavily reliant on government social services, the parents of Chinese anchor babies were wealthy Chinese who legally paid their own way to the United States, freely spent money at American stores, and generally intended to return back to China soon after giving birth.

Just how many Chinese mothers have come over to the United States remains unclear. One report, though, cited an agency that claims it has helped over 600 mothers travel to the U.S. to have their children in the last five years.

The motivations of these families are far-ranging: from a desire to provide better educational and travel opportunities to their children in an increasingly competitive and international job market, to a clever way to skirt China’s one-child policy, to a desire to one day enjoy the American lifestyle and all the benefits – both social and economic – that entails.

Whatever their motivation, the machinations behind the process were always clear: for approximately $15,000, Chinese mothers were navigated through the process of applying for an American visa, including how to fill out forms and how to approach interviews given at American embassies by visa officers.

Once in America – mostly in cities on the West Coast but sometimes U.S. territories like Saipan - the mothers were given two months of prenatal care and a month of medical support post-birth. Throughout the three months, the mothers were given room and board and scheduled activities such as shopping trips at local malls or walks around the clinic for exercise.

Though many of these clinics operate without a proper business license, throughout their time in the U.S., the women were safe in knowing that everything they had done from the initial visa process that gained them entry to the United States to later applying for citizenship for their newborn was legal and fully protected under current U.S. law.

Both the 14th Amendment and State Department rules that don’t regulate pregnant foreign visitors ensured that.

Dual passports, double headaches
Fast-forward to today, and it would seem that the trend of pregnant Chinese women traveling to the United States to give birth has not abated. Yet, on the heels of such reports comes a new story from the Chinese newspaper, Economic Observer, that details the consequences that many of these mothers returning to China with their American children now face.

Perhaps the most immediate problem for families is the fact that China does not allow dual citizenship. Absent then of documents like a Chinese passport, birth certificate or a hukou – the infamous resident permit that allows Chinese citizens to legally live and work in a city – these children are foreigners in the eyes of the government and subsequently subjected to higher school tuitions and limited access to national health care.

Some parents have attempted to game the system by conning the Chinese government into issuing their children passports. Still others have paid for fake birth certificates and hukous that allow them to at least enroll their children in the local schools they desire without facing the additional fees required of foreign children.

However, with such steps come additional risks and concerns.    

With dual passports, comes the greater chance of getting caught by both Chinese and American authorities while travelling between the two countries. U.S. law stipulates that in most cases, dual nationals must use a U.S. passport to enter and leave the United States. However, to leave China on an American passport would expose a child’s dual nationality and in essence negate their ill-gotten Chinese citizenship.

In order to circumvent these legal landmines then, Chinese families often must apply for a visa to a second country or a region like Hong Kong, where they transit through using their Chinese passports to enter and then fly onwards from there to the United States on their American passports.

Finally, Chinese babies born in America will eventually find themselves subjected to the same civic responsibilities that other citizens must face: taxes. After they turn 15 years old, Chinese anchor babies will be expected to pay state and federal taxes. While the consequences of not paying taxes vary from state to state, it is clear that the benefits that they would be entitled to had they paid would not be fully afforded to them.

Also of particular interest to Chinese families of anchor babies is that while their children will one day be able to sponsor their the parents American citizenship when the children turn 21, it will be a difficult case to make to immigration officers about their suitability if their offspring have not paid any taxes into the system.  

Whether the State Department decides to amend this loophole or whether the experience of this first generation of Chinese anchor babies proves troublesome enough to deter people remains to be seen. However, it should be comforting – perhaps coldly so to some – to Americans to know that despite all the news one reads almost daily about China gaining on the United States in a variety of measurables, U.S. citizenship still remains a hotly desired status symbol for much of China’s privileged and economically mobile class.