ExclusiveChina Stands Alone as G20 Takes Aim at Trade Imbalances | China in Focus

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Our top story, China standing alone at the G20 finance ministers meeting. 19 nations are backing a U.S. push to tackle global trade imbalances. Birthright citizenship in the U.S. exploited. A hearing on Capitol Hill is examining birth tourism schemes with China at the center of the discussion. A search warrant was executed A U.S. journalist sentenced to two years for spying for China. What did he do? And how was his secret operation uncovered? Taiwanese firms are planning to invest another 20 billion dollars in the U.S. The island's economy minister says orders for AI and semiconductors are surging. And Australia and the U.S. announcing nearly 600 million dollars in funding for Pacific island nations. Where does the battle for influence over these key islands stand? The U.S. is leaving the G20 finance ministers meeting with a message for China. Washington has rallied 19 member nations to call out China for driving global trade imbalances. China was the lone dissenter. China has rejected key clauses aimed at addressing trade imbalances. Those proposals would require member nations to crack down on dumping curb government subsidies into industries and give the International Monetary Fund a bigger role in monitoring trade imbalances. The U.S. Treasury then released a G20 chair statement on Tuesday. It is clear that the country with the world's largest and unsustainable current account surplus, People's Republic of China, was the dissenter. For years, Beijing has relied on dumping exports to fuel its economic growth. But as U.S. tariffs close off the American market, cheap Chinese goods are flooding markets across Europe, Asia and Latin America. We believe that non-market-based economies pushing out a never-ending stream of cheap exports is not sustainable. I think that the fact that 19 countries did want to address this shows the sheer enormity of the problem. Meanwhile, Secretary Besant says the U.S. is not looking to decouple from China, but it does want to reduce the risks. He also confirmed that President Trump and his Chinese counterpart are expected to discuss global safeguards for advanced A.I. at their meeting later this month. The goal is to keep powerful A.I. technology out of the hands of terrorist and extremist groups. President Trump on Tuesday calling the G20 finance ministers meeting, quote, very productive and positive. He thanked Treasury Secretary Scott Besant and called on other countries to follow the U.S.'s The exploitation of birthright citizenship taking center stage at a hearing on Capitol Hill. The House Oversight Committee on Tuesday probing birth tourism schemes that have been going on across the country. NTD's Sam Wong has the story. The point is that American citizenship is the most valuable thing in the world, and it's not something that we just hand out to anybody who crosses our borders illegally and gives birth. This is something that we should value and that we should give out on our terms. At a House oversight hearing, Republican lawmakers taking aim at birth tourism and its impact on national security. It's the practice of foreigners coming to the United States to give birth so that their child automatically becomes a U.S. citizen. The committee subpoenaed the head of a South Florida company that openly advertised birth tourism to foreign nationals. Does your business help children of members of the Chinese Communist Party obtain American citizenship? On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer the question on the grounds that a truthful answer may tend to incriminate me, and I invoke my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, an estimated 20,000 to 26,000 babies are born through birth tourism each year. This immigration loophole has been exploited by Chinese nationals with affiliation to the Communist Party. And just last year in 2025, a search warrant was executed on an operation tied to a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party, which turned up 15 children linked to multi-state embryo networks, all results of birth tourism. And many of these children were sent back and educated in China while still retaining the right to vote in U.S. elections, despite not having any allegiance to the United States. You could take somebody, even educate them in English, plug them back into the American society. A baby doesn't have control of that, but the parents certainly do. The question is, why are they doing it? They either don't believe in their own country, which I find hard to believe, or they're doing it for nefarious purposes to gain some sort of influence into America. After the Supreme Court ruled to keep birthright citizenship in place, President Trump last month signed two executive orders aimed at stopping birth tourism. Meanwhile, the State Department created a task force to crack down on such practices, revoking nearly 900 visas as a result. Reporting from Capitol Hill, Sam Wang, NTD News. An American journalist was sentenced Tuesday for spying for the Chinese Communist Party. He will spend two years in prison. Thomas Palkin II pleaded guilty in June to taking in $100,000 over seven years from his Chinese handler. Prosecutors say he was told that his reports would be sent to Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping. In a sentencing hearing Monday, the prosecutor described the case as emblematic of Chinese espionage. He said Palkin committed his crimes even though he knew what was right. The 51-year-old was arrested in February, days after trying to recruit a Trump administration official for his handler. Officials say Palkin kept working for Beijing even after the FBI issued him a warning last year. They also say he was offered a $10,000 bonus to cultivate his source for Beijing. A disturbing new discovery about how the Chinese Communist Party gathers secret information. Two senior Trump administration officials say Chinese shipping giant Cosgo has been collecting U.S. intelligence. They say Cosgo uses hidden equipment on its ships to spy on military communications near the coastlines of countries like the U.S. The company is accused of collecting signals from ships and aircraft across North America, Europe and Asia and passing the intelligence to Beijing. The officials say this operation has been going on for decades. Cosgo is one of the top global shipping companies calling at U.S. ports. It also has joint ventures that operate container terminals at some U.S. ports. The Pentagon has put Cosgo on its list of companies linked to China's military but has not formally sanctioned it. Chinese law requires all Chinese companies to cooperate with the regime's intelligence efforts. Taiwanese companies are planning another $20 billion investment in the U.S. That's as demand for AI applications and semiconductors continue to surge, according to Taiwan's economy minister. The Trump administration has been pushing Taiwan's tech firms to ramp up their investments with the goal of shoring up domestic semiconductor manufacturing on American soil. A Commerce Department official welcomed the announcement, saying it demonstrates a shared commitment to strengthening the semiconductor and electronics supply chain. Taiwan's TSMC is the world's largest contract shipmaker. In July, it announced another $100 billion investment in the U.S., bringing its total investment here to $265 billion. A $580 million investment to battle China's influence in the Pacific, the U.S. and Australia announced the funding together on Wednesday. Even though the U.S. contribution is smaller at $150 million, it still signals that Washington places importance on the Pacific region. That's notable given the administration has shut down USAID, the government agency responsible for distributing foreign aid, citing wasteful spending. Here's Australia's Prime Minister making the announcement at the Pacific Islands Forum. Pacific leaders have asked for Australia to do more, and we will do more. Today I announced that Australia will contribute a $600 million package that includes a range of measures, enhanced aerial surveillance, more training for regional police. The Pacific Police Initiative is playing a really important role. Although small, the Pacific island nations are key to U.S.-China competition in the region. For Beijing, those islands are essential to restricting U.S. military power in the Indo-Pacific and isolating Taiwan militarily. To that end, the Chinese regime has been expanding its influence, becoming a key trade and investment partner for nearly every Pacific island country. Beijing has a security agreement with the Solomon Islands. Chinese Navy ships have also called up ports in Vanuatu. And Beijing has a comprehensive strategic partnership with the Cook Islands. The West has been pushing back. Australia and Vanuatu signed a deal two months ago banning any foreign military base in the island nation. The U.S. and New Zealand also pledged $60 million to upgrade a port at a World War II-era military base on the Cook Islands. The project sits around 1,800 miles from the capital of Hawaii. The death toll from Nepal's devastating flash floods has climbed above 1,100. Authorities say more than 4,500 people remain missing. More than 900 bodies that have been recovered remain unidentified. Across the border, China's official death toll in Tibet remains at 16, with around 550 people still listed as missing. However, foreign journalists have been denied access to the region, making it difficult to verify the numbers and the scope of the search operation. Rescue teams are continuing searches at hydropower sites in Nepal, where blocked tunnels and water are hindering search operations. Meanwhile, authorities are warning residents in several parts of Nepal to remain alert as major rivers rise. Coming up, the space race. The next arms race is coming. Once again, it's a race between the U.S. and China. Will the two rivals stand? And yes or no to data centers? That's the question being debated across the U.S. and China trying to influence that debate for its own interests. An expert weighs in. More on that after the break here on China In Focus. Welcome back to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. The next arms race may not be on Earth. Space is quickly becoming the next military frontier. Let's take a look. We took a look at how the U.S. and China, two of the world's leading space powers, are preparing for the potential of conflict extending into space. Over the past couple of years, China has demonstrated increasingly sophisticated capabilities on orbit. Western officials have described what they've seen as akin to dog fighting on orbit, where two or more satellites move around each other. What we found in our research was that institutions linked to the Chinese military are continuing to pursue developments. That includes satellites designed to pursue others or even capture them using nets. We also found that the U.S. and U.K. conducted their first military operation in space in the path of a Chinese satellite that's suspected of spying, in what some military officials phrase to us as equivalent to a naval operation or an air mission to send Beijing a signal. The context is this. Traditionally, militaries would rely on satellites to provide services such as communications and navigation to troops here on Earth. They would put satellites into orbit. They would rain on fixed paths, and they were seen as passive assets. Today, militaries increasingly view satellites as weapon systems that need to be able to maneuver and fight, as one space commander put it to us. Space is becoming increasingly important to all of our lives, from our mobile phones to our banking systems to our agriculture industry. And what Western officials say is that threats to space could have an impact not only for militaries, but also for the public at large. Yes or no to data centers? That's the question being debated across the U.S. right now. But a foreign country may also have a strong interest in the debate and could eventually try to influence discussions in the U.S. To discuss this, I spoke with Michael Lucci on Tiffany Meyer Tonight on Tuesday. He's the founder and CEO of State Armor, an organization that helps states develop solutions to global security threats, especially those posed by the Chinese regime. X saying it has identified a suspected Chinese bought farm with about 200,000 accounts. The platform saying about 200 of those accounts posting in a way that could manipulate the U.S. debate over AI and energy policy. Axios reporting the posts pushing claims about data centers straining the electrical grid, raising power prices, and their operators profiting at the public's expense. Data centers providing the computing power behind the AI buildout. As the U.S. and China competing to develop the world's most advanced artificial intelligence systems. X not saying how many people saw the posts or whether they had any effect. An early August University of Pennsylvania survey finding 61% of Americans oppose new data centers in their backyards. And joining us now, Michael Lucci, founder and CEO of State Armor, an organization helping states enact solutions to global security threats, especially those posed by the Chinese regime. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. Great to see you now on this issue. President Trump posted on Truth Social yesterday saying, quote, the only reason that communities throughout the USA should not want data centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor, if they want to be successful and rich with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place. Let data reign. Now, the president added, if we kill the golden goose, you will only have yourselves to blame. China could not be happier with this anti-data center movement. Your response to the president's statement there? President Trump is nothing if not extremely direct at the, you know, at the high level, he's absolutely right. Data centers are really technology infrastructure. They're technology infrastructure that will be used for fighting wars, for discovering drugs, for inventing the next piece of software, for inventing the next, you know, invention that's going to change our economy. That is what they are already. And that's what they will be more and more over the long term. And so President Trump is right that these, conceptually, our technology sector is the golden goose that keeps laying the golden eggs. And we want to keep growing and growing and growing. Now, you know, individual communities might have a little bit of a nuanced position. I mean, it's all about, you know, real estate is all about location. So if it's right in your backyard, you know, that's one thing. But what we are finding is that when data centers are being put in communities in reasonable locations that are not, you know, becoming some sort of blight that could actually make the area more economically attractive, they're doing very good things. They're driving down tax rates. You see that in Loudoun County, most particularly. They're driving down utility costs when it's done right. So President Trump is correct that we want to lead on the cutting edge on this technology that will be military and it will be technology as well. And given that, how concerned should we be about these China-backed influence campaigns targeting U.S. data centers right now? This is absolutely what they're doing. So they've done this before. They've done this to our energy sector. They run through organizations like Energy Foundation China. They have influence with groups like the Environmental Law Institute. They wanted to undermine our energy sector. Why? So that we don't build our own net gas, our own oil. We depend on their technologies that have kill switches and backdoors. And that actually, some of that has happened. So this is just the next step. They don't want us to build the infrastructure to dominate in artificial intelligence, to dominate in software applications. Why? Because they want us to depend on them again. They want us to use their artificial intelligence tools where they have no limits on how much sort of electricity they could build out or how many data centers they could build. And really, we should think about what that world looks like. If this dystopian future occurs where all the software built in the United States is using Chinese artificial intelligence, all of our systems will be so full of kill switches and exploits that we're just going to be hacked constantly. And that's exactly where Communist China wants us to be. A concerning image for sure. In terms of these posts, are there any real and valid concerns such as water, electricity usage that are being over-exaggerated in these anti-data center bot-generated social media posts? So the water issue, I want to put on one side, the water issue is almost totally fabricated. So there are data centers that are saying that they use like three or four Olympic pools worth of water. That's not very much water compared to even just watering your yard, maintaining a golf course. I think it is interesting though, that this whole claim about water originated from a reporter who later admitted that she missed the estimation by a thousand fold. She was off by a factor of a thousand. And what happened since then? She's moved to Communist China. So I think that that's worth looking into, that the reporter who came up with this water idea is now in China. And then she also admitted that she had the wrong numbers. In terms of utilities, it depends on if you do it the right way. If you have data centers bring their own power, like is happening in West Texas, where they're going to power with natural gas, they're getting out of West Texas. What will happen is that they will sell excess electricity onto the local grid so that neighborhood electricity costs, your costs and my costs, get driven down. That's the right way to do it. That can work in a lot of circumstances. We just have to make sure that we get those parts right. And expanding on that, President Trump recently spoke about the issue of building data centers. Let's actually take a listen to that. Data center subject to me is a pretty simple one. If you pick the right location, and it's got to be, not every location is perfect for it, but you pick the right location. What it means for a community is jobs and lots of money and lower taxes. And the data centers now are mandated by me that they build their own electricity. So they're not taking it for the grid. And that electricity that they have left over is going to the grid. It's going to lower the cost of electricity. And Michael, your thoughts on the president's approach there? Well, of course, President Trump focuses on jobs, and he's right to do so. You actually have trade unions coming out and saying that they're going to oppose those who try to destroy the data centers because these are obviously massive construction projects. So that's a huge amount of jobs as if you're building any other part of really important infrastructure. But then the ongoing maintenance is going to provide all kinds of blue-collar jobs. So we're developing sort of cutting-edge technologies, but a lot of the jobs and a lot of the wage growth is going to come in the blue-collar sector. So it should be win-win across all these communities. On the issue of taxes, I mentioned Loudoun County. I was actually shocked to look at the numbers. Half of their property tax revenue comes from data centers. That means with no data centers, you would double the property tax for everybody living in Loudoun County. I think that that's an incredible accomplishment to be able to drive down taxes like that, and that's the model we should be spreading across the country. To your point, we are seeing trade unions coming out in support of this. Back to the anti-data center information war that Beijing has waged against the U.S., what are some effective and practical ways to counter it? How should we be fighting back against it? So we really need to start leveraging our open society, which they exploit. They exploit our open society. We have to leverage it better to explain what communist China is doing here. So on the one hand, the concerns that you and I are talking about right now, water usage, electricity, we should have an open debate about these topics. And I think that with an open debate, the American people are going to land in a very good spot on these things. Some places it will make sense, some places it will not make sense. But through an open debate, we're going to have economic growth. We're really good at allowing economic growth, particularly here in Texas. But we also need to recognize broadly across our society that communist China infiltrates our conversations. And what they really want to do is to turn us against ourselves. So I mentioned that they want to undermine our energy sector by getting us to just not build and not drill anymore. They want to undermine our technology sector by getting us to not build data centers so that we're not able to develop the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. We need to understand more broadly that this is their method across every sector of the American economy. That's all for today's China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. If you have any feedback on the show or have something you'd like to see us cover, send us an email at chinainfocusantd.com. We'd love to hear from you. For on the clock original news coverage, visit us at ntd.com or download our NTD app. Thanks for watching. See you tomorrow.