China threatened on Tuesday to respond to the US decision to classify four Chinese media outlets as "foreign diplomatic missions", accusing it of being "propaganda devices" for Beijing.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Zhao Legian, said the decision "exposes all hypocrisy of the so-called freedom of expression and press that the United States boasts of."
Zhao called on Washington to return "immediately" from its decision, "otherwise, China will have no other choice but to adopt an appropriate response."
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Monday that he had requested "the designation of four additional advertising agencies for the People´s Republic of China as foreign diplomatic missions."
Under the new designation, these Chinese media organizations now need prior approval from the ministry to purchase any property in the United States, and they are also obligated to provide lists of all their employees, including American citizens.
The four media outlets covered by the decision are "China Central Television", "China News Service" agency, "People´s Daily" and "Global Times".
This decision is added to another similar decision taken last February against five other official Chinese media outlets: the Xinhua News Agency, the Chinese world television network, CGTN, and China Radio International, and American distributors of the newspaper, the People. And "China Daily".
In late February, China expelled three American journalists from the Wall Street Journal in retaliation for an article published in the New York newspaper, which Beijing considered racist.
In the aftermath, Washington sharply reduced the number of Chinese allowed to work in the Chinese official media in the United States.
The Chinese authorities responded to that decision by expelling more American journalists for the Wall Street Journal and two other American newspapers, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
When asked about the danger of Monday announcing that Beijing would take new countermeasures against American journalists working independently in China, US Deputy Secretary of State for East Asian Affairs David Stillwell did not rule out this scenario.
Human rights defenders fear that Beijing will use this "pretext" to make the work of the country´s international press more difficult.
