36 United States
News from China of more than 1m people, mostly Uighur
Quid pro quo
N E W YO R K
The White House kicks out journalists
working for China’s state media
F ifty years ago a New York correspon-
dent for Pravda, the mouthpiece of the
Soviet Communist Party, was expelled.
This was in retaliation for the expulsion
from Moscow of a correspondent for Time
magazine, after a cover story that had dis-
pleased the Politburo. Months later a News-
week reporter was expelled from Moscow.
America retaliated by kicking out a corre-
spondent for Tass, the Soviet news agency.
The American government has not played
this game since the cold war, but it is re-
suming now, with a different adversary.
On March 2nd, less than two weeks after
China expelled three journalists for the
Wall Street Journal, the State Department
announced that it was placing a cap of 100
on the number of Chinese citizens who
could be employed in America for five
state- and Communist Party-owned media
organisations—a reduction from their cur-
rent total of 160. The cap, effective from
March 13th, means that up to 60 Chinese
nationals will be forced to leave, a dip-
lomatic swipe that adds a new tension to
the relationship.
China’s ejection of the reporters came a
day after the Trump administration desig-
nated the five state- and party-owned me-
dia outlets as foreign missions of the Chi-
nese government, to reflect their function
as propaganda instruments, officials said,
as opposed to independent news organisa-
tions. The five are: Xinhua, cgtn, China
Daily, China Radio International and the
distribution arm of People’s Daily, the
party’s mouthpiece.
Administration officials said the visa
caps were meant to establish “more reci-
procity” with China in how the countries
treat journalists. (American news organi-
sations in mainland China employ about
75 non-Chinese citizens, including Ameri-
cans.) They argued that Chinese state me-
dia employees in the United States still op-
erate unencumbered, working and
publishing as they (or their employers)
please, while American journalists in Chi-
na face harassment, intimidation and the
threat of expulsion.
The expulsion of the Wall Street Journal
reporters putatively came as punishment
for a headline in the newspaper’s opinion
pages that described China as the “sick
man of Asia”. But the reporters had also dis-
pleased authorities in Beijing by working
on stories related to Xi Jinping, China’s
president, and the internment in Xinjiang
Lori Lightfoot
Muslims. The Foreign Correspondents’
Club of China, in a survey published on
March 2nd, said that since 2013 the Chinese
government has expelled or declined to re-
new visas for nine reporters and imposed
tighter leashes on foreign journalists in the
form of short-term visas that must be re-
newed frequently. More than 80% of for-
eign correspondents surveyed said they
had encountered “interference, harass-
ment or violence” while working.
China hawks have long advocated re-
taliation against state media operating in
America. Some have suggested the admin-
istration’s actions do not go far enough in
sending a message to Beijing. President Do-
nald Trump could threaten to blunt China’s
propaganda drive in America more di-
rectly, by taking aim at the broadcasts of
cgtn, or at the practice of paying for China
Daily’s reports to be published as inserts
into American newspapers. That would ac-
cord with the Trump administration’s ar-
gument that the Chinese employees affect-
ed are not “journalists” but propaganda
workers, like those for Pravda and Tass.
Press-freedom advocates have argued
that instead America should set an exam-
ple, as an open society. Raising the cost to
China, albeit marginally, of treating for-
eign journalists poorly, may seem like a
good idea. The problem for America is that,
when playing this game, the side that cares
about press freedom is at a disadvantage to
the one that does not. On March 3rd Hua
Chunying, spokeswoman for the foreign
ministry, intimated in a tweet that “reci-
procity” would mean tougher visa restric-
tions for America’s media, perhaps includ-
ing single-entry visas that force journalists
to reapply for entry every time they leave
the country. “Now the us kicked off the
game,” she wrote, “let’s play.” 7
Big Brother on Times Square
The Economist March 7th 2020
Policing poverty
CH I C A G O
Chicago’s mayor thinks she has a plan
to end poverty in a generation
B lack families on Chicago’s South and
West Sides have long endured jobless-
ness, decrepit housing and violence. Lori
Lightfoot, the city’s mayor for the past nine
months, has made cutting poverty her
main goal. Like the rest of the country, the
city is doing well on this score: the poverty
rate for Afrian-Americans and Hispanics
has been creeping down, though that has
more to do with low unemployment and
decent wage growth than with City Hall.
Ms Lightfoot, who grew up poor in Ohio,
speaks personally about privation. Her
childhood taught her “what hardship and
financial struggle was all about”. Though
her father had three jobs, the family saw
cars repossessed and services cut off for
unpaid bills. She put herself through col-
lege and studied law. Her first summer job
paid more than her father had ever earned.
She was too embarrassed to tell him.
This sort of story is still common in Chi-
cago. In its public schools 76% of students
qualify for free meals because of low in-
comes. When classes end, many do with-
out nutritious food. Life-expectancy can
vary by as much as 15 years between neigh-
bouring areas on the South Side. Ms Light-
foot points out that Cook County, which in-
cludes the Windy City, has the highest rate
of personal bankruptcies in Illinois—often
because people owe debts to the city.
Ms Lightfoot traces inequality’s roots in
America to the “original sin of slavery”, and
blames government for keeping black fam-
ilies down. She cites redlining, a practice of
city governments and mortgage-lenders to
determine which neighbourhoods Afri-
can-Americans were allowed to live in, and
the de facto segregation of black children at
school. A mayor cannot do much about
that history, and in any case many of her
plans are small-bore. She will start by
scrapping city fines and fees that burden
the poor especially—as a small example, li-
braries no longer charge for overdue books.
She wants more rights for tenants and the
end of regulations that take away drivers’
licences for petty infractions, because los-
ing a car often means losing a job.
She promises an extra $750m over the
next three years to spruce up roads, parks
and public transport in ten corridors run-
ning through needy districts. Philanthro-
pists and foundations will be tapped for
help. She will also expand a financial mod-
el that diverts some capital from firms
building offices and skyscrapers down- 1
 The Economist March 7th 2020
Lori Lightfoot looking left
2 town to boost small businesses in poor ar-
eas. Rahm Emanuel, her predecessor,
launched that scheme in 2017 and says it
will soon be worth $170m.
One of Ms Lightfoot’s plans is genuinely
radical, however. Citing the “outrageous
amounts of money that we spend on a
criminal-justice infrastructure that is
mostly punitive”—over $1.7bn a year for
policing—she wants to switch spending to
social and economic needs. Broken fam-
ilies, poor care for children and overall de-
privation are the deepest causes of violent
crime, she argues. Spending on mental-
health care, she says, could do more to curb
crime than paying for lots of arrests.
None of that will be easy. The wealthy
voters who swept Ms Lightfoot to office last
year could grow jittery if cuts to police are
followed by a spike in violent crime. More
important, the Chicagoans most affected
by violence are the city’s poorest residents,
whom Ms Lightfoot wants to help. She risks
a sour relationship with the police after
sacking their superintendent for ethical
lapses in December. Her separate plans to
tackle corruption leave some long-serving
city aldermen uneasy. And her record as a
negotiator has yet to be proved after Chica-
go’s teachers won big payouts from her last
year, after a lengthy strike.
Ms Lightfoot’s aspiration to “end pover-
ty in a generation” has a further glitch. The
poverty statistics are skewed by a decades-
long collapse in the black population.
Since 2010 the city has seen a net loss of
70,000 black residents, who fled to the sub-
urbs, next-door Indiana or southern cities
like Atlanta. Part of the decline in poverty
simply reflects the fact that there are just
fewer poor African-Americans in Chicago
now. Yet some of those left behind are too
poor to move, making the poverty that re-
mains even more intractable. 7
Donald Trump’s record
The toolkit
WA S H I N GTO N , D C
In the second in a series examining how the president has governed, we look at
the omb, an obscure but important federal agency
A merica’s government, as all its citi-
zens learn at school, comprises three
branches: executive, legislative and judi-
cial. At the top of the executive branch sits
the actual executive—the president. But
the branch also includes an array of agen-
cies, both the departments represented in
the cabinet, and others—including the Na-
tional Security Council and the Council of
Economic Advisers—that make up the Ex-
ecutive Office of the President (eop). These
agencies advise on and implement presi-
dential policy. Most of the eop gets repopu-
lated with a change in administration, as it
should: new presidents have new policy
agendas, which require new personnel.
The exception to that rule is the eop’s
biggest office: the Office of Management
and Budget (omb). Most of its 500-odd em-
ployees are career civil servants who take
pride in providing nonpartisan advice to
presidents of both parties. In 1921 Charles
Dawes, the first head of the omb’s predeces-
sor agency, the Bureau of the Budget, ex-
plained that if Congress “passed a law that
garbage should be put on the White House
steps, it would be our regrettable duty, as a
bureau, in an impartial, nonpolitical and
nonpartisan way, to advise the executive
and Congress as to how the largest amount
of garbage could be spread in the most ex-
peditious and economical manner.” Rus-
sell Vought, the omb’s acting director, calls
his office “the president’s Swiss army
United States 37
knife”. It has been central to Donald
Trump’s efforts to loosen environmental
regulations and to cut budgets. It also
played a role in the Ukraine scandal.
When Congress refused to appropriate
adequate funds for Mr Trump’s border wall,
omb found it. When the government shut
down in 2018-19, the omb found ways for
the Internal Revenue Service to send out
tax refunds, and for the Department of Ag-
riculture to provide food stamps. The
omb’s job is to understand the mechanics
of federal-government operations, and ex-
plain to the president and his staff how to
get things done. Its titular head is Mick
Mulvaney, who is also the president’s chief
of staff, but Mr Vought, a former Hill staffer
and vice-president of Heritage Action, a
conservative policy-advocacy group, has
operational control.
The omb staff often have backgrounds
in law or public policy, and tend to like
their work: for the past five years, the omb
has ranked in the top quartile of small fed-
eral agencies in the Partnership for Public
Service’s “Best Places to Work in the Federal
Government” survey. (It had dipped early
in the Obama administration; Peter Orszag,
Mr Obama’s first omb director, was widely
disliked.) One senior official in a previous
administration praised the office’s civil
servants: “I thought they were just so good,
so knowledgeable. They were stubbornish
about making clear what they thought, but 1
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