>>10976524
>>10976552
cont
In a press briefing on Sunday, Trump criticized the Reuters story as “100 percent wrong.” Yet the CDC acknowledged the position had been cut. The agency said the decision was made because of China’s “excellent technical capability,” and said the elimination of that post did not hamper the U.S. effort to respond to the coronavirus outbreak.
The CDC staffing documents newly reviewed by Reuters show a sharp decline in the overall number of employees at the agency in Beijing, with 33 out of 47 positions lost.
The documents show the breakdown between American and Chinese staffers. The number of so-called American “assignees” declined to three positions from eight at the outset of the administration. Positions lost included medical epidemiologists and other experts in infectious diseases.
The biggest cuts were to positions filled by Chinese employees on the U.S. payroll, down to around 10 from 40 over the same period. Many of those local hires included medical and disease experts, according to the people who spoke with Reuters.
“Local staffers stayed even longer at the CDC and had a real depth of knowledge,” one of the people said. “There’s a loss of deep expertise and institutional knowledge.”
The CDC told Reuters the three Americans currently on staff in China are a country director, an influenza expert and an information technology expert. A temporary deputy director arrived recently, and that job will be filled permanently, the agency said in a statement. In addition, two Chinese staffers continue to work on specific public health areas, including the training program, according to the statement.
The shuttered USAID and NSF offices in China also had a role in building scientific relationships and combating global disease, according to the four people familiar with the situation.
USAID’s Beijing office, which was staffed by a senior U.S. officer and two Chinese employees, was working on initiatives including multidrug-resistant tuberculosis and malaria, the people said. The office closed in 2019.
The NSF office was once led by Nancy Sung, a respected American scientist who was a key link between the U.S. and Chinese scientific communities, according to the U.S. government official who spoke with Reuters. The office also employed two local staffers.
“She had far more contacts than most of us,” said the official, who had been in China at the time and was familiar with her role. “She could have helped maintain vital channels of communication between the two countries which to this day is greatly curtailed.”
Sung, who is now with the NSF in the United States, declined to comment about the closure of her office in 2018 and referred questions to the agency’s public affairs office.
‘WITHOUT BENEFIT TO THE U.S.’
The changes came amid escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing. Trump has long complained that China has stolen millions of American jobs and intellectual property, charges the Chinese government has rejected as baseless. The countries have slapped billions in tariffs on each other’s goods. Now their leaders are battling to control the narrative over the pandemic. Trump has called it the “Chinese virus” to keep the focus on China’s role in unleashing the pandemic. China, meanwhile, is trying to assert global leadership by providing aid to Italy and other hard-hit countries.
Over the last two years, the White House has pushed U.S. agencies with a presence in China to de-fund programs there along with the positions to manage them, according to the U.S. official who spoke to Reuters.
The source said Terry Branstad, the U.S. ambassador to China and a former Republican governor of Iowa, tried to remind the White House of the importance of the U.S. presence in China but was told to “get with the program” by an administration official.
“The White House saw the relationship as one-sided and without benefit to the U.S.,” the source said.
A State Department spokesman said in a statement that the U.S. Embassy in China is “one of our largest, reflecting the many areas of bilateral engagement.”
cont