US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urges China’s citizens to help ‘change the behaviour’ of their government
- Top US diplomat hopes to drive a wedge between China’s people and Communist Party
- Speech is Trump administration’s latest salvo against Beijing, which it regards as America’s foremost national security threat
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the nation’s chief diplomat, has called on China’s own citizens to join an international effort to “change the behaviour” of their government.
Aiming to drive a wedge between the Communist Party and those he sees opposing it – including China’s “1.4 billion people who are surveilled, oppressed, and scared to speak out” and Asia-Pacific countries like Vietnam and Australia – Pompeo proposed “a new alliance of democracies” to push back against “the Chinese Communist Party’s designs on hegemony”.
“The UN, Nato, the G7, the G20 – our combined economic, diplomatic, and military power is surely enough to meet this challenge, if directed properly,” Pompeo said in a speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, where he welcomed the prominent Chinese dissidents Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan. “Maybe it’s time for a new grouping of like-minded nations.”
We must also engage and empower the Chinese people … a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.
“Our approach can’t just be all about getting tough,” he said. “We must also engage and empower the Chinese people … a dynamic, freedom-loving people who are completely distinct from the Chinese Communist Party.”
Pompeo’s address, titled “Communist China and the free world’s future”, was the fourth speech in a month from a top US official criticising Beijing for its actions and global ambitions, a ratcheting-up of tensions capped by the State Department’s order this week that China must close its consulate in Houston, Texas.
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