WASHINGTON—An Epoch Times staff member who planned on traveling with the White House press corps to cover U.S. President Donald Trump’s visit to China this week was denied a visa to enter the country.
Travis Gillmore, White House reporter for The Epoch Times, applied for a visa on April 10, filling out a lengthy application that requests information about family members and employers. The status of the application remained “pending review” and was never updated.
Staff members of NTD, The Epoch Times’ sister media outlet, including White House correspondent Mari Otsu and cameraman Lei Chen, were also denied visas. Otsu received treatment similar to Gillmore’s, while Chinese American Lei was immediately rejected.
This was the second time Epoch Media Group staff were denied visas for Trump’s trip, which was initially planned for late March. Due to the schedule change, they had to submit their visa applications twice.
Trump landed in Beijing on May 13 at 7:50 p.m. local time (7:50 a.m. ET) for meetings with Chinese leader Xi Jinping. This is his first state visit to China since 2017.
The Chinese communist regime also denied visa applications for other members of the White House press corps. According to a source familiar with the travel plans, at least 20 individuals who planned to cover the trip did not receive visa approval.
A group of journalists, photographers, and videographers has joined the president for the two-day Beijing summit on May 14–15.
Discussions between Trump and Xi are expected to include trade, rare-earth shipments, artificial intelligence, the ongoing war in Iran, and the island of Taiwan.
Questions remain about the communist party’s use of political prisoners and human rights abuses to maintain control of its population.
China’s pattern of using visa denials and delays as diplomatic and political leverage is a recurring theme the regime employs to limit critical media coverage.
The Epoch Times was founded in 2000 in the United States by Chinese Americans in response to censorship and human rights abuses in China. It is an independent news organization that now publishes in 22 languages across 33 countries. The publication has nearly 1 million paid subscribers, making it one of the largest American news publishers by digital subscriptions.
Over the years, the newspaper has faced sustained efforts by the Chinese regime and its agents to shut it down. These have included attacks on the newspaper’s reporters and printing facilities in Hong Kong.
Growing CCP Pressure
Despite its size and global reach, The Epoch Times was not allowed to attend major press events at the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Malaysia last year. This included Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s July visit for the Foreign Ministers’ Meeting and Trump’s October meeting with ASEAN leaders.
The NTD team also ran into similar obstacles in Gyeongju, South Korea, last October while covering the meeting between Trump and Xi at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference.
At both ASEAN and APEC meetings, Beijing demonstrated significant regional influence, partly because many member countries have strong economic ties with China.
For years, Chinese authorities have put pressure on the U.N. to interfere with The Epoch Times’ reporting efforts.
In 2003, after days of unanswered follow-ups, a U.N. press official in New York City told NTD that “pressure from the Chinese” had caused complications with its application to cover the Human Rights Commission events in Geneva. The same thing occurred again in June 2004, with a U.N. official acknowledging that the agency had received calls from Chinese officials about the broadcaster’s press access. The agency, after an initial rejection, eventually issued the credential.
Eva Fu contributed to this report.
