China will change us
Pompeo calls for triumph over tyranny
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called on “free nations” to triumph over the threat of what he said was a “new tyranny” from China.
“Today, China is increasingly authoritarian at home, and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else,” Mr Pompeo said at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California. “If the free world doesn’t change communist China, communist China will change us.”
Speaking a day after the
State Department ordered China to shut its Houston, Texas consulate, Mr Pompeo laid out Washington’s rivalry with Beijing in language that recalled the Cold War with the Soviet Union.
And in an uncommonly virulent attack, he accused Chinese President Xi Jinping of being a “true believer” in the “bankrupt” totalitarian Marxist-Leninist ideology.
“His ideology informs his decades-long desire for global hegemony built on Chinese communism,” Mr Pompeo said.
The speech marked a new level in the hard-line approach toward China by Donald Trump’s administration.
It was the fourth in a series of major policy speeches by top administration officials, including White House National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien, FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney-General Bill Barr, each of whom focused on one facet of the alleged China threat in ideology, espionage and commerce.
It also comes after Mr Pompeo declared China’s geopolitical claims in the South China Sea fundamentally illegal after the Pentagon sent two aircraft carriers to the region to underscore the point.
Mr Pompeo said Beijing had taken advantage of US and Western generosity as it implemented reforms and joined the global economy in the past four decades.
He strongly criticised previous US administrations for being too complacent with China and US companies for being too compliant.
He said Beijing had broken international commitments on Hong Kong’s autonomy, on the South China Sea and on stopping state-backed intellectual property threats. And he said those “failed promises” included not being forthright about the beginnings of coronavirus.
“We can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries,” he said.