ExclusiveChina's Xi arrives in U.S. for State Visit | China in Focus

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Our top story. President Trump greets Chinese leader Xi Jinping in person as the state visit kicks off. Meanwhile, the administration says it's open to extending the trade truce with China. We look at what's high on the agenda. We hear from Dr. Peter Navarro, senior counsel to the president, about China's economic aggression and his new book in which he argues that Dr. Fauci should be imprisoned. A Capitol Hill hearing highlighting the high cost of Beijing's human rights abuses. An active duty U.S. service member recounted what her parents experienced while being detained in China. Those with cold water denied sleep, scalded with hot water and forced to drink urine. Grease road. Quote, I was completely devastated. And Taiwan is watching the upcoming Trump-Xi summit closely. A security researcher says Taiwan shouldn't be overly concerned. We'll have his take and Taiwan's response on U.S. arms sales. The U.S.-China trade truce might be up for renewal as President Trump greeted Chinese leader Xi Jinping personally at Joint Base Andrews today. The three-day trip marks Xi's first state visit to the U.S. in over a decade. And the world is watching how they will address topics that shape the world, trade, Iran, Taiwan and artificial intelligence. Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said today the U.S. is open to extending a trade truce with China, which is now set to expire on November 10th. We're open to the idea of just continuing the Busan arrangement or examining the bigger deal. The trade truce includes Trump lowering tariffs and shelving expert controls on thousands of Chinese companies, whereas Xi agreed to suspend rare earth controls and resume purchases of U.S. soya beans. As senior U.S. officials said, the flow of rare earths from China has not been up to par. So it's a topic of discussion. But there isn't going to be any relaxing of expert controls for more certainty around rare earths. On top of this, analysts think Trump wants China to pressure Iran and order U.S. agricultural products and Boeing planes, concrete deals that would be helpful for midterm elections. Xi wants access to U.S. technology and market. He's also expecting to press Trump on holding off U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. The U.S. has yet to approve a $14 billion arms sales to Taiwan. Trump once described the sale as a good bargaining chip in negotiations with China. Over on Capitol Hill, five senators calling on the administration to release over $15 billion installed national security assistance for Taiwan. On A.I., there are no signals from either side of slowing down development. That's despite hot discussion over the possibility of A.I. eliminating humanity. Trump posted on Monday that whoever wins A.I. wins, adding the U.S. is leading China. Days before the Trump-Xi meeting, Chinese tech giant Alibaba rolled out a new A.I. chip. Huawei launched new chip technologies to challenge NVIDIA. Meanwhile, Roger Whitaker, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Trump should not invite Xi for such a lavish welcome. Here's Secretary of State Marco Rubio's response. The United States and China are the two largest economies in the world. The United States and China are probably the two most powerful militaries in the world. The relationship between the United States and China will define the 21st century, what happens in that relationship. The idea that we would not interact with them at the The two leaders are set to have bilateral talks tomorrow at the White House. Testimony on Capitol Hill on Tuesday from prisoners, families and communities who have been persecuted by the Chinese Communist Party. Ahead of President Trump's summit with Chinese regime leader Xi Jinping, they are appealing for the release of their loved ones and those imprisoned for their religious beliefs in China. And today's Fiona Ji reports. At a hearing in front of the Congressional Executive Commission on China, or CECC, accounts of torture against prisoners of conscience. Those with cold water denied sleep, scalded with hot water and forced to drink urine. Grace wrote, quote, I was completely devastated. My father never spoke to me about the horrors That's the story of Grace Chen, who is currently serving in the U.S. Army. Chen's parents were arrested in China and imprisoned for practicing Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, which is a spiritual practice rooted in the principles of truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. And Chen's story isn't unique. The Minghui website, which collects reports from across China, has documented more than 5,300 deaths from abuse since 1999. Last year, Chinese courts sentenced more than 550 people to prison for simply practicing Falun Gong. And the police arrested or harassed nearly 5,000 more. And the threats don't stop at China's borders. Members of targeted communities are increasingly experiencing the CCP's transnational repression on American soil. More than 600 cases were documented across 30 states where people have suffered from physical violence, harassment, verbal abuse, threats of violence, reprisals against family in China, and surveillance, all for practicing their faith right here. Members of the Uyghur community, the Christian community and American families have all spoken out against the unlawful imprisonment of their loved ones in China. The CECC says such imprisonment is unacceptable. Behind every person in the Chinese prison is a family waiting, praying, and hoping that someone will not forget them. And behind many of those families is an entire community that feels threatened and far too often intimidated. Communities are calling for more legislative action, including extending the Foreign Agent Registration Act to better mitigate the CCP's transnational repression. CECC co-chair Chris Smith says the commission will be immediately transmitting the victims' testimony and calls for action to President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Reporting from Washington, D.C., Fiona Ji, NTD News. Chinese Communist Party leader Xi Jinping is visiting Washington this week meeting with President Trump. This as the White House issues a report on the great transshipment scam. For more insights, NTD's Fiona Ji spoke with Dr. Peter Navarro, senior counsel to the president, about China's economic aggression and his new book about the The White House released a report last month, The Great Transshipment Scam. I know you've talked at length about this as well, the way China's able to skirt these tariffs by putting their products through these third-party countries. We've also seen, of course, Treasury Secretary Besant was speaking with his Chinese counterpart over the weekend. What is being done to mitigate Chinese invasion of these tariffs? I'm so glad you asked that. The Great Transshipment Scam, it's a report that my office did, the White House Office of Trade and Manufacturing Policy. You can go to the White House website or you can go to my personal website, PeterNavarro.com and access the report. Here's the deal. I was one of only three people who served President Trump all four years in the Trump White House in the first term. I was part of the Section 301 tariffs that we put on China in 2018 to defend ourselves against what I call the seven deadly sins of Chinese aggression. It's the subsidies, the counterfeiting, intellectual property theft, currency manipulation. We put the tariffs in place on China. What China immediately began to do was figure out a way to evade the tariffs by going through third parties. Instead of shipping directly to the United States, it would go through Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand. Over time, the list of countries has grown to over 40 countries in the world that facilitate this smuggling, this Great Transshipment Scam. It costs the American people tens and tens of billions of dollars every year as China evades these. Your question is, what can be done about this? What I'm doing in my office, I'm working with the Customs and Border Protection on what we call the new AI-detected border. I'm running a pilot project with CBP now. At any minute in the world, we know that ships are leaving ports from all over the world coming here. We're able to look at those shipments at the container level and analyze literally billions of bits of data in real time in a matter of minutes or hours and calculate with a high degree of probability whether that's a transshipped container. Dr. Navarro, let's get into your book here. You've got a new book out, Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison. Give us a taste of what's in here. What findings do you think will stand out most to readers when they read this? Well, for folks who follow this particular show, I think the most fascinating aspect is how Fauci, as the head of a major agency, used government taxpayer dollars to fund experiments, gain-of-function research experiments, at a bioweapons lab in Wuhan, China. Through that activity, he almost certainly created the virus that created the pandemic. That in and of itself is a revelation. What I do in Why Fauci Must Rot in Prison is I show the cover-up that Fauci did to try to convince people in this mass hypnosis that somehow that virus was from nature, not from the Wuhan lab. He was actively involved in that. I talk a lot about the so-called bat lady who would go and get viruses from caves 1,000 miles from Wuhan, bring them back, and then use the technology of Tony Fauci, basically, to do these wild experiments to turn harmless bat viruses into things that can kill you. I think that's a really important part of the process. Everybody watching this show was victimized by the pandemic from Wuhan, from China, but was also victimized by the kind of policies that Tony Fauci foisted upon us. What's so extraordinary is the discrepancy between what Fauci was saying in his own diary and what he was saying publicly and doing publicly. One of the most heinous acts that he should be in prison alone for is he failed to disclose to pregnant women in their first trimester that there was a risk associated with a vaccine. He writes about that in his diary, talks about it with somebody else in the medical bureaucracy. Then he goes out and says, you know what? You're fine. It's a revelation about what somebody who most people in this country thought was a good man that they worshipped and they trusted. He turns out to be one of the most evil people on the planet. At the heart of that evilness is his cooperation with the CCP. Taiwan closely watching the Trump-Xi summit. A Taiwan security researcher says Taipei should not be overly concerned about the talks between the two leaders. He says China is focused on stability as Xi prepares for a potential fourth term. Here's what Domingo Aikwei Yang had to say about the meeting and what it could mean for Taiwan. I think Trump and Xi's meeting is very significant because it sends signals of stability and it sort of de-escalates the competition tension. But I don't think Trump's relations with Xi would change the entire structural trajectories of the U.S.-China competition. And when it's about U.S.-China competition, Taiwan's role in the fourth island chain is indispensable. Chinese regime leader Xi Jinping is expected to raise the issue of Taiwan with President Trump, including U.S. arms sales to the island. Beijing has repeatedly called for an end to those sales, while Washington continued providing Taiwan with weapons for self-defense. Meanwhile, Taiwan's defense ministry says it will keep working with Washington to secure those arms deals. I think maintaining security and stability in the Indo-Pacific region is in the shared interests of democratic countries. The U.S. administration and Congress have repeatedly expressed support for Taiwan's self-defense capabilities. Therefore, we will continue to maintain close contact with the U.S. War Department and continue to advance the implementation of arms sales as planned. The U.S. already approved an $11 billion arms package for Taiwan last year, the largest to date. A second package worth roughly $14 billion remains on hold. President Trump said the package would stay that way following his talks with Xi earlier this year. Coming up, a Washington hearing sheds new light on China's religious persecution. We spoke with a persecuted group about how that repression is reaching U.S. soil and what can be done. More on that after the break here on China In Focus. Welcome back to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Human rights groups pressing President Trump to raise China's record when he meets this week in Washington with China's leader Xi Jinping. To discuss the human rights situation in China and Beijing's long arm on American soil, I spoke with Mark Yang on Tiffany Meyer Tonight on Tuesday. He's a researcher and advocacy officer at the Falun Dafa Information Center. Mark was at Tuesday's hearing in Washington, D.C. Take a look. And I think there is a consensus in the room that, you know, the issue of repression inside China regarding religious freedom, regarding human rights, is extremely urgent and extremely important. And I have spoken with a few of the audience members after the hearing, and they all told me that, well, they really think the hearing shed a light on how this repression inside China is not just happening to an individual or happening to a small group of people. Instead, the sheer scale is astonishing. For example, just on Falun Gong practitioners alone, we're talking about 70 to 100 million people practicing at the time of the persecution in 1999. So that was one in 13 Chinese people that practiced Falun Gong. And at the same time, there are millions of Uyghurs, millions of Tibetans that are also under repression. So this is something that is extremely, extremely important, given just how many people are being persecuted. And secondly, it's also important, as we are seeing, that this is a regime that can, you know, just torture and kill their citizens at will for their faith, for their ethnicity. And, well, is this really a good partner for the United States, right? Is this a good trading partner? Is this a good geopolitics partner? So all of these are really good discussions to have and really good things to think about. And digging into the topic of the spiritual group Falun Gong, at that hearing today, Erping Zhang, spokesperson for Falun Gong, testified that the Chinese Communist Party still treats Falun Gong as a top priority target. Now, for viewers who may not be familiar with the persecution, can you explain what that means in practice and why the regime continues to prioritize it more than 27 years after that campaign began? Absolutely. Actually, let me just give you an example to shed light on what the persecution really looks like. So last week, William Huang, so he is a practitioner from Pennsylvania, he came to DC for an event hosted by IRF Summit to talk about his stories. So years ago, when he was in China, he was a PhD candidate at just probably the most prestigious university inside China, like the Harvard of China, right? And just because of his faith, because he believed in truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance that the exercise teaches, well, he was expelled from his program. And he was thrown into a labor camp for five years, where he suffered tremendous torture, he suffered a lot of humiliation. And he was forced to produce a lot of goods, such as necklaces, toys, such as Christmas decorations, and where he was able to find those exact same products on the shelf in America. And he brought with him a Spider-Man figure. And this was the exact ones that he used to produce inside China. So this really shows that this is the gravity that is happening inside China with how the people are being persecuted, and how that is not only reserved in China, but also impacting us Americans. And regarding prioritizing, I think with the CCP, I think they're really frustrated by the resilience that the Falun Gong practitioners are showing. And this is because after 27 years, Falun Gong is still holding strong, still millions of people practice both inside China and outside. And that the people, especially in the United States, the U.S. practitioners founded groups such as the Shenmue Performing Arts, which is a music and dance company that is probably one of the most popular ones in the world. And through music and dance, it also showcases stories that depict the persecution inside China. And that is raising awareness about the persecution. Because of all of these efforts, the CCP is really seeing that they are not defeating Falun Gong, just like how the Romans cannot destroy the Christians, they cannot destroy Falun Gong. And to your earlier point, Mark, Zhang's testimony today also underscored that this repression does not stop at China's borders, it reaches into the United States and affects communities far beyond Falun Gong practitioners themselves. Can you give us a clear picture of what that looks like on American soil, the scale of incidents, the tactics used and the wider implications for U.S. sovereignty and freedom? Absolutely. So earlier this year in June, the Falun Dafa Information Center, we published a survey report, and that is documenting over 1,000 respondents from across the United States. And nearly 50% of them said that they have encountered at least one instance of transnational repression since 2022. So this really shows just how wide the scale is of these things happening in the United States. And we have documented over 600 instances across 30 U.S. states. And these show up as physical violence, they show up as harassment, reprisals against family members inside China, surveillance, directly listening on people's phone calls and such. So all of these are happening. And to illustrate it, one case that Erping also cited during his testimony is that there is a CCP agent called Zhang Chen. He was sentenced by the U.S. Justice Department for 20 months in 2024. And he was sentenced for one, acting as an unregistered CCP agent. And second is for him to try to bribe an IRS official to revoke Shen Yun's nonprofit status. So this is just a clear case of how a CCP agent is trying to manipulate our U.S. government to undermine a group that the CCP decides to target. So this really brings to question and is really concerning because what the CCP is currently doing, the same mechanism, the same targeting can be used against any other entity that the CCP decides they do not like next. And before I let you go, Mark, what would meaningful progress on human rights actually look like? What should Americans be watching for coming out of this meeting? Well, I think with China with its atrocious record on human rights, I think every single baby step matters. So first of all, we saw the release of estrogen, just fantastic, fantastic progress. So we really hope that this time the Trump administration can bring up the issue about persecution happening inside China, transnational repression issues in the United States, and at the same time, press Xi Jinping to release other prisoners of conscience, which there are millions still detained inside China for their freedom and for them to get back to their families. 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 ChinaInFocus and td.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.