China’s economic system is leading to sickness and death for the “victims” forced to live under the regime, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday.
Pompeo, who spoke to the Iowa Farm Bureau in Des Moines, Iowa, unleashed a broadside against Chinese President Xi Jinping’s autocracy while touting the superiority of American agriculture during an address. The speech, billed as an opportunity to discuss the ongoing trade war, contained an indictment of Beijing’s rival system of so-called “authoritarian capitalism.” It also gave Pompeo the opportunity to sound the anti-socialist note that has been a recent theme of President Trump as socialism gains currency among some Democrats.
“Think back to 2008, when tens of thousands of Chinese children got sick from contaminated milk and baby formula — several of them dying,” Pompeo said. “Just as China has guarantees of human rights written into its constitution, China boasts plenty of food safety laws. It’s not about writing down one more regulation or one more rule. But enforcement is weak or nonexistent. And as we see so often in socialist countries, the prevalence of corruption in China’s state-commanded economy frequently allows this kind of fraud to go undetected, and almost always unpunished.”
Pompeo is in Iowa on a mission to reassure voters in the Hawkeye State, a traditional battleground in presidential elections that emerged as a key arena for the trade war. China released a battery of retaliatory tariffs and even advertisements designed to turn the swing-state voters against Trump’s trade policies.
Pompeo’s team maintained he is in Des Moines on official business, although Iowa is an early primary state and Pompeo is thought to harbor presidential ambitions.
Pompeo said throughout the trip that negotiations to secure better treatment for U.S. businesses is progressing well. But he stressed that the harm done to American companies because of trade and the Chinese people have the same tyrannical taproot.
“It’s an economic model that has for years survived on protectionism, rule-breaking, and state subsidies,” Pompeo said of the regime. “American agriculture exporters aren’t the only folks that are the victims of [China’s] state-dominated economy … it is the Chinese people who suffer as well.”
China’s recent ability to prosper economically without providing political freedom has caused Western officials to worry that the dictatorial regime will function as a model for autocrats around the world. And Beijing is using that economic might to finance a “cold war” against the United States, according to Pompeo’s former colleagues at the CIA, who warn of a “systems conflict” that will shape the next century.
Pompeo implied the United States will win that conflict, because Xi didn’t learn enough from visiting Iowa early in his career.
“They haven’t fully embraced the principal ingredient for Iowa’s success, which is free enterprise and hard work and a central idea of allowing individuals to have their own autonomy and their own dignity,” he said. “When the heavy hand of government dictates economic policy, we all know that productivity plummets. Innovation, necessarily, grinds to a halt. And people are much worse off.”
