Hawkish US VP Mike Pence will speak on China – and is expected to slam it over its human rights and religious freedom record

US Vice-President Mike Pence will deliver a speech on US-China relations at Washington’s Wilson Centre on June 24, eight months after he condemned Beijing for the “control and oppression” of its citizens.

The date and venue of the speech were confirmed Thursday by Robert Daly, director of the Wilson Centre’s Kissinger Institute on the United States and China.

Pence’s China speech would come at a low point in bilateral relations, which have been damaged by a trade war that started nearly a year ago and comments the vice-president made in his earlier address.

In that speech – delivered in October at the Hudson Institute, another Washington think tank – Pence accused China of trying to interfere in the US midterm elections, which were then a month away.

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“Our intelligence community says that China is targeting US state and local governments and officials to exploit any divisions between federal and local levels on policy,” Pence said at Hudson.

“What the Russians are doing pales in comparison to what China is doing across this country,” he added.

Many China analysts have pointed to Pence’s October speech as a defining moment in bilateral relations, sparking debate about whether it heralded the start of a new cold war.

“This is the Trump administration’s ‘evil empire’ speech,” Bonnie Glaser, a China expert at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, said in an interview with Vox after the speech. “This looks to me like deliberate confrontation.”

The speech was “a declaration of a comprehensively adversarial relationship with China”, Daly said in an interview shortly after Pence made the remarks.

“I know of no historical precedent for declaring a strategic disposition in quite this way,” Daly said at the time, adding that Pence’s comments had “immediate and potentially major consequences for every sphere of US-China interaction: corporate, academic, strategic”.

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Daly has worked for decades to foster closer bilateral ties. He served as the American director of the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Center for Chinese and American Studies in Nanjing. He was also a diplomat, serving as cultural exchanges officer at Washington’s embassy in Beijing for several years starting in the late 1980s.

Established by the US Congress in 1968 as a memorial to former President Woodrow Wilson, the think tank where Daly works bills itself as “the nation’s key non-partisan policy forum for tackling global issues through independent research and open dialogue”.

The Hudson Institute has a more hawkish stance on China. The think tank’s Centre for Chinese Strategy is led by Michael Pillsbury, a China critic whom US President Donald Trump has called “the leading authority” on the country.

Pillsbury’s 2016 book The 100-Year Marathon claims that Beijing has a century-long plan built on a series of strategic deceptions to use the US to help it develop before it ultimately takes over as the world’s leading superpower.

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Daly declined to speculate about the tone Pence might take in his speech at the Wilson Centre, but the vice-president is expected to censure China for its record on religious freedom and human rights, CNBC reported last week, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter.