CHINA WANTS Trump gone, Pence says.
He points to meddling as proof it wants ‘different president’
WASHINGTON — China “wants a different American president” and is working to undermine President Donald Trump and influence U.S. elections, Vice President Mike Pence asserted Thursday in a sharply critical speech that marked another escalation in rising tensions between Washington and Beijing.
Speaking at the conservative Hudson Institute, Pence accused China of using trade, diplomatic overtures and military expansion to spread its influence around the world and to work against U.S. interests. He called on American business leaders, academics and journalists to counter Beijing’s global campaign and vowed that Trump “will not back down” in the face of China’s challenge.
“President Trump’s leadership is working; China wants a different American president,” Pence said. “China is meddling in America’s democracy.”
The vice president’s remarks served as the latest salvo from the Trump administration during a deepening trade war with China and new military hostilities. Top White House aides have said the administration is developing new policies to mark a turn in the bilateral relationship away from cooperation in many areas and toward outright competition.
At the same time, Trump has continued to press Beijing to support efforts to pressure North Korea into relinquishing its nuclear weapons.
This week, a Chinese warship conducted a dangerous maneuver and sailed within 45 yards of a U.S. Navy warship in the contested South China Sea, a crucial shipping corridor where China has sought to establish maritime dominance.
“We will not be intimidated and we will not stand down,” Pence said, referring to the incident.
At a United Nations conference last week, Trump accused Beijing of trying to influence the election in retaliation for the escalating trade war in which both nations have enacted tariffs on more than $250 billion worth of goods. The president did not offer evidence of interference by Beijing, though administration officials told reporters that they viewed a number of Chinese actions as tantamount to interference.
Pence cast Beijing’s efforts as a highly coordinated, “whole-of-government approach” to promote its interests around the world, including in the United States.
On the election interference issue, Pence cited an advertising supplement purchased by Chinese state media in the Des Moines Register in Iowa as an one example.
“The supplement, designed to look like news articles, cast our trade policies as reckless and harmful to Iowans,” he said.
Pence said China has responded to Trump’s tough trade policies against Beijing with tariffs of its own designed to inflict maximum political damage.
“By one estimate, more than 80 percent of U.S. counties targeted by China voted for President Trump and I in 2016,” Pence said. “Now, China wants to turn these voters against our administration.”
Hours after Pence spoke, China rejected the allegations of election interference as “completely ridiculous.”
“We have no interest in interfering in the internal affairs and elections of the United States,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hua Chunying said. “The international community sees very clearly, in fact, which country is the one that invades the sovereignty of other countries, interferes in other countries’ internal affairs, and damages the interests of other countries.”
Pence’s speech amounted to a broad indictment of the methods and goals of what China insists is its peaceful rise to an economic great power. He said China is not being forthcoming about the real aims of its military expansion in the South China Sea and elsewhere and that it was cheating and effectively extorting U.S. firms while persecuting and subjugating Chinese people.
“Beijing now requires many American businesses to hand over their trade secrets as the cost of doing business in China. It also coordinates and sponsors the acquisition of American firms to gain ownership of their creations,” Pence said. “Worst of all, Chinese security agencies have masterminded the wholesale theft of American technology — including cutting-edge military blueprints.”
He urged Google to “immediately end development of the ‘Dragonfly’ app that will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers.” Google employees and others have protested the company’s plan to build a search engine that would comply with Chinese censorship.
Pence sought to put China on the defensive over human rights, citing the persecution of up to 1 million Uighurs, a Muslim minority group in the western part of the country, who have been detained in “re-education” camps.
The vice president also criticized China for blocking U.S. media websites and making it more difficult for Western journalists to secure visas, a move that Pence said came after The New York Times published critical stories about the wealth of Chinese leaders several years ago.
Information for this article was contributed by Adam Taylor of The
Washington Post; and by Deb Riechmann and Zeke Miller of The Associated Press.