China has a “neo-imperial” ambition to make the entire world comply with its communist ideas, according to a senior State Department official.
“We know that the Chinese Communist Party’s neo-imperial ways aren’t incidental to its character but are an essential feature of a nationalist and Marxist-Leninist mindset,” State Department assistant secretary David Stilwell, who leads the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said Tuesday. “Beijing wants to dominate its immediate neighborhood — and eventually impose its will and its rules on your neighborhood too, wherever you may be.”
Noting Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s denunciation of China’s claims to sovereignty over vast swathes of the South China Sea, Stilwell emphasized that the United States will aid “allies and friends,” such as the Philippines, if China uses force to deprive such neighboring states of their economic rights in the waterways.
“We are building our military capabilities. We are vigilant. We are exercising and operating wherever international law allows,” Stilwell said during a virtual conference hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Pompeo’s detailed rejection on Monday of China’s territorial claims built upon a 2016 ruling made by an international tribunal in a case brought by the Philippines. The assertion builds on previous statements emphasizing that a clash in the South China Sea between China and the Philippines would trigger U.S. action under a mutual defense treaty.
“There has been an improvement in terms of American commitment to its allies, especially on the South China Sea question over the past few years under the Trump administration,” Richard Javad Heydarian, a Manila-based analyst, said during a CSIS panel following Stilwell’s presentation. “That statement will have certain operational implications, particularly in terms of what are going to be the contingency plans, in terms of the application of the mutual defense treaty, if China engages in any provocative action.”
China will portray the South China Sea controversy as a dispute between Washington and Beijing, Stilwell predicted, but he argued that the dispute is a preview of China’s actions in sensitive arenas around the world.
“Wherever you are, Beijing increasingly wants to stake claims, coerce, and control. By its nature, it cannot accept a pluralistic world with fundamental freedoms of choice and conscience,” he said. “The South China Sea, then, is less a faraway exception and more a sign and a threat of how the Chinese Communist Party will seek to act — unless it faces pushback.”
