WASHINGTON — The Chinese government denounced on Monday the United States’ secret expulsion this fall of two Chinese diplomats suspected of espionage, and asked for a reversal of the action. The expulsions appeared to be the first of Chinese diplomats suspected of spying in more than three decades.
The two men were detained with their wives after the group drove through the outer perimeter of a sensitive military base in Virginia — the one that houses a fenced-off inner compound with the headquarters of the Navy’s elite commando unit, SEAL Team 6, according to two people briefed on the episode.
The statement by the Chinese Foreign Ministry, made at a regularly scheduled news conference in Beijing, was the first official acknowledgment by either side of the expulsions, which were reported by The New York Times on Sunday. Neither Washington nor Beijing made an announcement at the time of the expulsions, and the State Department still has not publicly acknowledged them.
The two Chinese Embassy employees from Washington drove in late September without permission onto the base, the Dam Neck Annex of Naval Air Station Oceana, five miles south of downtown Virginia Beach. The men and their wives ignored a guard’s order to turn around just inside an entry checkpoint and depart. They did not stop until fire trucks drove onto a road to block their path, according to people briefed on the intrusion.
American officials believed at least one of the men was an intelligence officer with diplomatic cover, the people said.
“The U.S. accusation on our officials is completely inconsistent with the truth,” Geng Shuang, a Foreign Ministry spokesman and former employee of the embassy in Washington, said when asked in Beijing about The Times article. “We urge the U.S. to correct its mistake, withdraw this decision and protect Chinese diplomats’ legitimate rights and interests according to the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations.”
He added, “We’d like to remind the U.S. that it is a reciprocal process for countries to grant work-related convenience and guarantee to foreign diplomats following the Vienna Convention.”
The State Department did not reply to a request for comment on Monday. Last week, it declined to answer questions about the expulsions and base intrusion.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Uriah L. Orland, said the Defense Department had no information to provide about the episode. “We take the security of all our installations very seriously,” he said.
The last known expulsion of Chinese diplomats suspected of espionage took place in 1987. That occurred after a nearly yearlong operation in which the F.B.I. caught one of the two diplomats trying to accept what the diplomat believed to be classified National Security Agency documents at a restaurant in the capital’s Chinatown area from a person who was secretly working for the F.B.I. It was the first time the United States had expelled any Chinese diplomat since normalization of relations between the two nations in 1979.
After The Times story was published Sunday, some Chinese Embassy officials continued to insist in private that their colleagues who drove onto the base had made an innocent mistake. Earlier, Chinese diplomats had told associates that the embassy employees had been on a sightseeing trip.
One associate of the embassy said some Chinese officials were still asserting that the State Department had expelled the diplomats to retaliate for a propaganda campaign that Beijing had run in August against Julie Eadeh, a political officer in the American Consulate in Hong Kong. Chinese state-run news organizations accused Ms. Eadeh of being a “black hand” behind the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests, and someone posted personal details of her online. That infuriated senior State Department officials, and the agency spokeswoman called the Chinese government a “thuggish regime.”
Chinese diplomats asked the State Department whether it was carrying out the expulsions because of what happened to Ms. Eadeh, according to people with knowledge of the discussion.
The episode at the base intensified concerns within the Trump administration that Chinese intelligence agencies are expanding espionage efforts in the United States, whether through hacking, human intelligence gathering or other methods. American intelligence officials say they regard China as the greatest spying threat, in the same way that the Soviet Union was during the Cold War.
American officials said they were alarmed by several recent episodes in which Chinese diplomats have turned up unannounced or uninvited at research or government centers. On Oct. 16, just weeks after the base intrusion, the State Department announced it had imposed a new rule on diplomats working at Chinese Missions in the United States or its territories: The diplomats must give notice to the State Department before meeting with local officials or making visits to research or educational institutions.
A State Department official said at the time that the rule was a reciprocal action intended to push back against the Chinese government for restrictions it had imposed for years on travel by American diplomats. Such a rule had been under discussion for a while, but episodes like the one at the Virginia base accelerated the rollout of the rule, American officials said last week.
Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington, and Claire Fu contributed research.