Ideological enmity underpins China's strategic competition with the United States, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Wednesday.
“Today, we’re finally realizing the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party is truly hostile to the United States and our values, and its worse deeds and words and how they impact us,” Pompeo said while being honored at the Hudson Institute’s Herman Kahn Award Gala.
American officials and lawmakers in both parties have agreed in recent years that China is a strategic rival, but Pompeo highlighted specifics.
“What Pompeo laid out finally, finally, is essentially an explanation of why the National Security Strategy says what it does,” the Hudson Institute’s Rob Spalding, a retired Air Force general and China expert, told the Washington Examiner. "Somebody needed to say to the American people and to, quite frankly, our allies and partners, why we're doing what we're doing.”
State Department officials see the repression in Xinjiang province — where China has put at least one million Uighur Muslims into detention camps and is “torturing them, abusing them," — as a sign of a broader systemic conflict. “That does not comport with what we believe, in that human rights are individual,” David Stilwell , the State Department’s lead official for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said last month .
The repression and abuse allegations are false, Communist officials maintain. “Demonizing China and inciting confrontation with it have become ‘politically correct’ in some circles,” Cui Tiankai, the Chinese ambassador to the United States, said in a speech delivered the same evening as Pompeo’s gala remarks. “To decouple from China is to decouple from opportunities; it is to decouple from a hopeful and developing world. It would not serve the best interests of either the American or the Chinese people. As for the attempt to demonize China, it only reveals the darkness of the perpetrators themselves.”
Pompeo framed Chinese Communist influence as an attempt to give the world “an entirely different model of governance” from the one enjoyed in liberal democracies.
“It’s one in which a Leninist Party rules and everyone must think and act according to the will of the Communist elites,” Pompeo said in his speech. "That’s not a future that I want, I think it’s not a future that anyone in this room wants, it’s not a future that other democracies want, and it’s not a future that the people of China – the freedom-loving people of China everywhere don’t want this model.”
