Bad-mouthing China a habit of the past

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo now habitually bears the shifty, hangdog look which foretells he is about to launch one of his verbal grenades at China. It is not a very flattering look, and he should beware it becoming permanent such is the frequency of his admonishing China for something or other.

In his latest snide rebukes on Wednesday, he told the CEOs of companies doing business in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region or with entities using Xinjiang labor to “be aware of the reputational, economic and legal risks of supporting such assaults on human dignity” and that Hong Kong’s enactment of the national security law “destroys the territory’s autonomy and one of China’s greatest achievements”. It seems the US’ top diplomat is forever either bad-mouthing China, or on the way somewhere to smear it.

His latest remarks follow hard on the heels of his comment last week that it is China’s “threat” to India and in the South China Sea that has prompted the US to shift its military forces from Europe to Asia, and his attacks on China at the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on June 19 and the Marshall Foundation Forum in Brussels on June 25. And that is not to mention the China-bashing that is now a routine feature of his meetings with the media.

Considering how much bad-mouthing he has done since his meeting with China’s top diplomat

Yang Jiechi in Hawaii on June 16-17, which both sides agreed was a “constructive dialogue”, the top US diplomat’s intensifying efforts to smear China may be excused by some as a manifestation of the acute sense of strategic anxiety permeating the US administration.

It is under the current administration that the US has taken the initiative to block normal technological, cultural, people-to-people exchanges with China under the pretense of safeguarding its national security; it is also under it that the US has reached out on all possible fronts to boldly interfere in China’s internal affairs in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and Taiwan. Pompeo portrays this meddling as having just cause. The irrepressible invective the US diplomat directs against China is just part of this campaign of pressure.

But by bragging about his military service in Germany during the Cold War whenever he is trying to peddle his vision of a divided world — a free one and a non-free one — with China apparently the leading proponent of the latter, Pompeo’s remarks lay bare the disturbing fact that although the Cold War has ended, he is still living that American Dream.

Of course, he is not the only US politician that has got lost in time. If the US decision-makers try to cope with today’s challenges with the tricks of the past, they will only accelerate their country’s decline into sidelined obsolescence.