No more Santa Xi: Revealing the truth to Trump

Trump Warns China He Is Willing to Pressure North Korea on His Own
By MARK LANDLER and JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ

President Trump boarding Air Force One at Morristown Airport in New Jersey on Monday after a weekend at his golf club in Bedminster. 

WASHINGTON — President Trump, frustrated by China’s unwillingness to lean on North Korea, has told the Chinese leader that the United States is prepared to act on its own in pressuring the nuclear-armed government in Pyongyang, according to senior administration officials.
Mr. Trump’s warning, delivered in a cordial but blunt phone call on Sunday night to Xi Jinping, came after a flurry of actions by the United States — selling weapons to Taiwan, threatening trade sanctions and branding China for human trafficking — that rankled the Chinese and left little doubt that the honeymoon between the two leaders was over.
After returning from his weekend getaway in Bedminster, N.J., late Monday, Mr. Trump noted on Twitter that North Korea had launched another ballistic missile, which landed in the sea between North Korea and Japan. 

He suggested it was time for China to act.
“Perhaps China will put a heavy move on North Korea and end this nonsense once and for all!” Mr. Trump wrote.

American officials, who would not be named talking about the continuing dialogue with the Chinese, said they hoped the tough steps by the United States would spur Xi to reconsider his reluctance to press the North. 

But Mr. Trump, one official said, now has fewer illusions that China will radically alter its approach to its reclusive neighbor, which is driven more by fear of a chaotic upheaval there than by concern about its nuclear and missile programs.
That leaves the president in a familiar bind on North Korea as he prepares to leave for a Group of 20 meeting this week in Germany, where he will meet Xi as well as the leaders of Japan and South Korea, nations Mr. Trump has also turned to in navigating his approach to the North.

Yet diplomatic engagement — which Xi continues to push, according to officials — is not a step that Mr. Trump is ready to consider, after the death last month of an American college student, Otto F. Warmbier, who was held captive in Pyongyang for 17 months, then freed in a coma.
A go-it-alone approach by Mr. Trump would also further antagonize China, since it would require blacklisting multiple Chinese banks and companies that do business with the North. 

The United States began doing so on a modest scale last week by designating four Chinese entities and individuals.
The precarious state of United States-China relations was captured by the way the two sides characterized the call. 

The White House said only that Mr. Trump had raised the “growing threat” of North Korea’s weapons programs with Xi. 

The Chinese, in a more detailed statement, said the relationship was being “affected by some negative factors.”
The latest of these — and perhaps the most grating to the Chinese — was a naval maneuver in which an American guided-missile destroyer sailed near disputed territory claimed by Beijing in the South China Sea. 

The movement by the warship, the Stethem, off Triton Island in the Paracel archipelago prompted a furious response from China’s government, which called it a “serious political and military provocation.”
Still, neither leader appeared ready to abandon the rapport that Mr. Trump and Xi established in April at a summit meeting in Palm Beach, Fla. 

Mr. Trump avoided any personal jabs at Xi; the Chinese government said tensions were to be expected in a relationship this complex. 

But each leader has learned a hard lesson about the other, according to officials and outside analysts.
Xi miscalculated what China needed to do to satisfy Mr. Trump, thinking he could buy him off with a few highly visible measures, like banning coal purchases from the North. 

Mr. Trump overvalued the personal touch by betting that a few hearty handshakes with Xi would overcome China’s deep-rooted resistance to pressuring North Korea.
“The Chinese tried to figure out what was the absolute minimum they needed to do,” said Bonnie S. Glaser, director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

“The administration has signaled repeatedly that they had to shut down these banks and front companies in northeast China that enable North Korea.”
Chinese officials professed surprise last week when the White House rolled out three tough steps, back to back. 

It imposed sanctions on a Chinese bank, accusing it of acting as a conduit for illicit North Korean financial activity, as well as on a Chinese company and two Chinese citizens.
It approved the sale of $1.4 billion in weapons to Taiwan, which China regards as a breakaway province. 

And it labeled China one of the worst offenders in an annual State Department report on human trafficking.
The White House also signaled it would act against imported Chinese steel as part of a broader campaign against steel dumping around the world. 

But the Commerce Department’s report on the steel market, which would be the basis for tariffs and other sanctions, is still undergoing revisions and will not be released before the Group of 20 meeting.
The American destroyer’s cruise past Triton appeared to be especially offensive to China. 

It was only the second time since Mr. Trump took office in January that an American warship had ignored China’s claims in the South China Sea. 

On May 24, another guided-missile destroyer, the Dewey, traversed Mischief Reef in the disputed Spratly Islands.

Washington and Beijing confirmed that Mr. Trump requested the call on Sunday. 

But American officials said their Chinese counterparts signaled that they were eager to clear the air after a bumpy week.
Cheng Xiaohe, an associate professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said it was “a little bit odd” that Xi had agreed to the call. 

Still, he said, the gesture indicated that China was seeking to maintain “stability and some momentum” with Mr. Trump and perhaps deter him from taking more extreme measures, such as military action.

China’s resistance has led Mr. Trump to turn to other nations, notably Japan and South Korea, for help in resolving the crisis.
He had a warmer call with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan, who praised his decision to penalize Chinese entities accused of doing illicit business with the North, according to Kyodo News, a Japanese news agency. 

Mr. Trump will host a dinner with Mr. Abe and Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s new president, at the Group of 20 in Hamburg on Thursday.

Rogue Nation

China Is Worst Human Trafficking Offender
By GARDINER HARRIS

Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson at the White House on Monday. The State Department dropped China to the lowest tier of its ranking this year in its annual assessment of global efforts to end forms of modern slavery. 

WASHINGTON — China is among the world’s worst offenders for allowing modern slavery to thrive within its borders, according to a strongly worded State Department report released Tuesday.
In its annual assessment of global efforts to end human trafficking — with an estimated 20 million people remaining in bondage around the world — the State Department dropped China to the lowest tier of its ranking this year, as it did with the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo.
Those three nations joined 20 others already in that lowest designation, including Iran, North Korea, Russia and Venezuela.
The report found that prosecutions for various forms of human trafficking — which include sex trafficking, including of children; forced and bonded labor; domestic servitude; and the unlawful use of child soldiers — dropped by nearly a quarter between 2015 and 2016, the first time the world had seen such a significant drop in recent years.

“Ending human trafficking is among the top priorities of the Trump administration,” Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and a key adviser, said in an event held Tuesday morning at the State Department to formally release the 17th annual report on the issue.
Ms. Trump singled out child sex trafficking. 

“On a personal level, as a mother, this is much more than a policy priority,” she said.
She joined Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson to release the report, and he spoke with a passion rarely displayed during his early tenure in public office.
“It is our hope that the 21st century will be the last century of human trafficking,” he said.
Mr. Tillerson had previously cautioned that values cannot be an obstacle to national security or economic interests. 

But, on Tuesday, he linked the problem of human trafficking to his top priority, ending North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile program.
Between 50,000 and 80,000 North Koreans are forced to work overseas, mostly in China and Russia, he said, and their wages are used by the North Korean government to fund its illicit weapons programs.
“Supply chains creating many products that Americans enjoy may be utilizing forced labor,” Mr. Tillerson said while Ms. Trump sat nearby. 

Ms. Trump’s shoe brand has come under criticism for its use of Chinese labor as well as the disappearance of three labor activists investigating conditions at the plants making her shoes.
Mr. Tillerson was criticized in March for failing to attend the release of the department’s annual human rights report, in what was considered a rare breach of a longstanding tradition by secretaries of state.
The report released Tuesday noted significant improvements in efforts to combat trafficking in 26 countries, including Afghanistan, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Ukraine.
Mr. Tillerson noted that Afghanistan was upgraded in part for its efforts to crack down on powerful male leaders sexually abusing boys. 

Malaysia was upgraded because of a significant increase in prosecutions for such offenses as employers who impound workers’ passports.
Qatar also earned an upgrade despite continuing concerns about migrant labor used to construct facilities for the 2022 World Cup.
Some human rights activists were critical of the report.
David Abramowitz, managing director of Humanity United, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending human trafficking, described “serious concerns” about this year’s report, which he said “included unjustified upgrades to Burma, Malaysia and Qatar and a failure to downgrade Thailand.”
Among the other reasons China was dropped to the lowest tier was forced labor among drug addicts and ethnic minorities, as well as reports that the country continued to forcibly repatriate North Koreans despite threats that Pyongyang would punish such returnees with prison and forced labor.
The fierce criticism of China promises to accelerate a rapid worsening of relations with the Asian nation that had briefly benefited from good feelings generated by an April summit meeting between President Trump and Xi Jinping at Mr. Trump’s Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago.
Mr. Trump decided to brush aside his fierce campaign criticisms of China’s currency and trade practices in hopes that the country would rein in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs. 

But Mr. Trump acknowledged last week that China had done little to pressure the government in Pyongyang, marking a failure of one of the administration’s top foreign policy priorities.
The Commerce Department is expected this week to announce that for national security reasons, the domestic steel industry must be saved from imports, beginning a process that could lead to significant tariffs being placed on imported steel. 

That action would likely infuriate the Chinese.
Thus, the designation of China as one of the world’s worst offenders in human trafficking is part of a cascade of signals from Washington that relations between the United States and China could soon slide steeply downhill, just as relations between the United States and Russia are reaching depths not seen since the Cold War.
Iceland was downgraded to the second tier of countries for failing to prosecute any suspected traffickers for the sixth consecutive year while also decreasing the number of investigations into suspected trafficking. 

The rankings of Bangladesh, Guatemala, Hungary, Iraq, Liberia and Nicaragua were also downgraded.

Axis of Evil

U.S. to list China among worst human trafficking offenders
By Matt Spetalnick | WASHINGTON

The United States plans to place China on its global list of worst offenders in human trafficking and forced labor, said a congressional source and a person familiar with the matter, a step that could aggravate tension with Beijing that has eased under President Donald Trump.
The reprimand of China, Washington's main rival in the Asia-Pacific region, would come despite Trump's budding relationship with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping and the U.S. president’s efforts to coax Beijing into helping to rein in North Korea’s nuclear and missile programs.
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has decided to drop China to "Tier 3," the lowest grade, putting it alongside Iran, North Korea and Syria among others, said the sources, who have knowledge of the internal deliberations and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The rating is expected to be announced on Tuesday in an annual report published by the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons. 

A State Department official declined to comment on the report's contents and said the department "does not discuss details of internal deliberations."
Tier 3 rating can trigger sanctions limiting access to U.S. and international aid, but U.S. presidents frequently waive such action.
While it was unclear what led Tillerson to downgrade China, last year's report criticized the communist government for not doing enough to curb "state-sponsored forced labor" and concluded it did not meet "minimum standards" for fighting trafficking.
The Trump administration has also grown concerned about conditions in China for North Korean labor crews that are contracted through Pyongyang and provide hard currency for the North Korean leadership, which is squeezed for cash by international sanctions, said the congressional source.
In Beijing, foreign ministry spokesman Lu Kang said the government was resolute in its resolve to fight human trafficking and the results were plain to see.
"China resolutely opposes the U.S. side making thoughtless remarks in accordance with its own domestic law about other countries' work in fighting human trafficking," he told a daily news briefing.
Since taking office, Trump has praised Xi for agreeing to work on the North Korea issue during a Florida summit in April and has held back on attacking Chinese trade practices he railed against during the presidential campaign.
But Trump has recently suggested he was running out of patience with China's modest steps to pressure North Korea, which is working to develop a nuclear-tipped missile capable of hitting the United States.
The annual report, covering more than 180 countries and territories, calls itself the world’s most comprehensive resource of governmental anti-human trafficking efforts.
It organizes countries into tiers based on trafficking and forced labor records: Tier 1 for nations that meet minimum U.S. standards; Tier 2 for those making significant efforts to meet those standards; Tier 2 "Watch List" for those that deserve special scrutiny; and Tier 3 for countries that fail to comply with the minimum U.S. standards and are not making significant efforts.
For the past three years, China has been ranked "Tier 2 Watch List".
In Beijing, the Chinese Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
In 2015, Reuters reported that experts in the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons had sought to downgrade China that year to Tier 3 but were overruled by senior diplomats.