Media report: Washington seeks visas for officials to attend Games

Visa applications have been made for a group of US officials as part of a delegation to China to provide security support during the Beijing Winter Olympics early next year even though the US announced this month that it would "not send any diplomatic or official representation" to the Games, the South China Morning Post has reported.

The US government recently submitted to China an application for three-month visas with a list of 18 personnel to attend the Games to provide "security support operations", according to two sources and a document that the Post, based in Hong Kong, cited.

Among the applicants, 15 work for the State Department and one works for the Pentagon, the Post quoted a source, who requested anonymity, as saying. The US may submit visa applications for another 40 officials to China in the next few months, the paper said.

The US said on Dec 6 that it would not send an official delegation to the Winter Olympics and Paralympics in Beijing, the first of which opens on Feb 4.

If the report is confirmed, it means that in internal discussions there are obvious differences among US government departments regarding the Beijing Olympics, the Global Times quoted Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of the China Foreign Affairs University, as saying.

If the State Department and Pentagon applicants "cannot be counted as US officials, then who can be?" Li said.

The administration of US President Joe Biden took the lead and fooled some hard-core US followers not to send officials to the Games, Li said, and once they did so suddenly changed its tone. "This behavior is a slap in the face and will catch US allies off guard."

After the US announced that it would not send government officials to the Games, Australia, the UK and Canada followed suit, and Japan joined that list on Friday.

The US has summed up its relationship with China as "competitive when it should be, collaborative when it can be and adversarial when it must be", Li said, and this line has tripped up those propounding it.

"The Winter Olympics should be an agenda of cooperation, yet the US has been trying to turn them into an arena of competition and confrontation, while lacking the capability to reach that goal."

From the days of Ping-Pong Diplomacy in the early 1970s to the Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984, sports was an important area for strengthening Sino-US collaboration, Li said, and the Beijing Winter Olympics should be no different.

"The US visa application might be a correction made by the Biden administration to its earlier announcement, and it can be regarded as a sign of the adjustment in US policy toward China. We hope that the US can make good use of such a rare opportunity to participate in the Winter Olympics, to strengthen cooperation with China in the future."