The US closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston could be due to intellectual property issues or because China rejected the US request to open a diplomatic base in the western part of the country.

Beijing said the United States on July 21 asked China to close the Houston Consulate General for 72 hours, marking an unprecedented move after 41 years of US-China relations established.

Hong Kong-based military analyst Song Zhongping said that the order to close the consulate in Houston may be related to the delay of US diplomats being allowed to return to their embassies and consulates in China,

According to Bloomberg, a telegram from US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on June 27 that diplomats and their families were not allowed to return to countries where they were subjected to involuntary testing or quarantine.

However, a diplomatic source in Beijing said the two countries had reached an agreement on US diplomats waiting to return to China.

Instead, the case may be related to intellectual property theft, allegations that the US repeatedly made to China.

Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, acting chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, accused the Houston consulate "of being essentially a front".

"It is the central bottleneck of major espionage - commercial espionage, defense espionage."

Meanwhile, Huang Jing, an American expert at Peking University of Language and Culture, offers another explanation.

For decades, American lawmakers and politicians have urged the State Department to set up a consulate in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and make it a prerequisite to satisfy Chinese demands.

"China considers the principle of reciprocity that both sides have the same number of diplomatic representatives in the other country, but for the US, that means the equivalent in both numbers and locations," he said.

Huang assessed that it is likely that both sides have contacted and talked about the closure of the Chinese consulate in advance.

In fact, the consulate closure does not have much impact on the short term.

The Consulate in Houston has about 60 employees.

US officials may have thought carefully when choosing a consulate in Houston because it is a sister city to Wuhan.

However, this decision shows the latest rift as Beijing and Washington are at odds over many areas, from the origins of nCoV to the problems of Hong Kong and Xinjiang.

Zhu Feng, a US expert at Nanjing University, said that while the consulate closure was unprecedented in US-China relations, the relationship between the two countries could hardly "fully collapse."

Daniel Russel, a former assistant secretary of state for East Asia, said the US move would cause Beijing to retaliate and further reduce diplomatic channels between the two sides.

Shi Yinhong, an expert at Peking University, said that from the US sanctions imposed on China because of issues like Hong Kong and Xinjiang and consulate closure, "they

"The move is political and legal," he said.