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Pompeo: China’s Government Is The Problem

This article is more than 4 years old.

It’s not the Chinese people that are the problem. It’s the Communist Party of China.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reiterated what Vice President Mike Pence said a week prior, that when it comes to China, Washington’s qualms are not with Chinese students, techies, scientists and shop owners, but with the leaders in Beijing.

“The communist government in China today is not the same as the people of China,” Pompeo said during a ceremony honoring him at the Hudson Institute in New York on Wednesday. Pompeo was given the Herman Kahn Award for his work on national security and his years of public service.

During yesterday’s speech, Pompeo said that the Chinese government was targeting the U.S. and using methods that have created challenges for the U.S. to confront them on it.

The full speech can be found here.

Over the last several weeks, Trump senior officials have made a point to separate the Chinese government from the people.

Over that same period, at least one school—the University of Delaware—announced it would not be renewing its agreement with the Beijing funded Confucius Institute on campus next year. Indiana University of Indianapolis did the same earlier this year.

China hawks, who are not hard to find, allege that the Communist Party uses these institutions as a way to get Chinese students to share academic research with the Chinese government.

Just three weeks ago, President Trump met with China’s Vice Premier Liu He to prepare for what Washington calls Phase 1 of a multipronged trade agreement with China. President Xi Jinping was supposed to sign on to the agreement during the APEC Summit in Santiago Chile next month. But Chile canceled that meeting and now there is no talk of an official signing by the two presidents.

Being nice to the Chinese people shows respect. But calling out their government, which Beijing considers to be the representative body of those Chinese, is not. At least not in the eyes of people like Xi Jinping.

Considering that Pence and Pompeo are now openly criticizing Beijing in the middle of trade talks, and the APEC meeting is canceled, the Phase 1 mini-deal is now in limbo.

Pompeo said the time is right for the U.S. to take on China.

Over the years Washington served China well. President Bill Clinton lobbied to get China in the World Trade Organization. Washington has also been “downgrading” its relationship with Taiwan in order to appease Beijing, Pompeo said.

The U.S. was not entirely the victim in this relationship.

For nearly 30 years, U.S. multinationals made China their go-to hub for manufacturing. Major brands from Nike to Apple have become almost totally dependent on China for their supply chain thanks, in large part, to cheap labor, low taxes, low regulations and the best port operations in the world—that were being built to serve them. Those companies grew their market share beyond the U.S., including in China, making their U.S. employees and their U.S. shareholders more money.

But beyond the profit margins for a few multinationals manufacturing in China, Washington and even some corners of Wall Street are now asking what China can do to return the favor. U.S. capital has gone to China and continues to do so. The Chinese are restricted from investing their money in the U.S. It’s a one-way relationship.

Despite Xi Jinping being the toast of the town in Davos at the World Economic Forum in 2017, a thinly veiled swipe at a new, protectionist American president, China is in fact the largest closed economy in the world.

Pompeo used his speech to call out China for its human rights abuses of minorities in the Western province of Xinjiang. He made it clear again that the U.S. is on the side of the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and not on the side of Beijing.

“We’re finally realizing the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party is truly hostile to the United States and our values, and how they impact us,” he said.

“We know too that China threatens American freedoms by demanding our companies self-censor to maintain access to that Chinese market,” he said. “We’ve all seen the stories recently of the NBA. The truth is Beijing ought to be free to run its own PR campaign; they’re a sovereign nation. But if we disagree, our companies ought to be permitted to have that disagreement. Silencing dissent simply is not acceptable.”

To the China hawks in Trump’s cabinet, the real target is the Chinese Communist Party.

It appears as if that Party is holding together. If there are any factions getting restless because of the trade war, they are being kept under wraps.

The Chinese Communist Party’s Fourth Plenum of the Nineteenth Party Congress ended on Thursday. The main topic of this year’s plenary session was about how Xi Jinping views China’s place in the world.

For years, narratives have swirled that the grumbling one hears emanating from the halls of the State Council or the board rooms from credit-starved private companies is coalescing into a more pronounced challenge to Xi’s authority, says Jude Blanchette, a China expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. “None of these insurrections have materialized,” he was quoted as saying on the CSIS website on October 25.

Xi was “glorified” in a National Day parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China earlier this month.

Pompeo would like to see the Communist Party fall. Or at the very least reform to be more in line with Western standards. This is most visible in Hong Kong, where young protesters are unhappy about the prospect of being just another China state in 2047, when the handover of Hong Kong to China becomes complete.

If Xi is facing blowback on any of this, no one has come forward to express it. No one of any political or economic clout has fled China with their families to unload on Xi to foreign leaders.

Xi is very much in charge, and the Chinese Communist Party is not weakening.

Instead, it’s likely that the narrative of a “great power competition” coming out of Washington will serve Xi to push a “fortress besieged” mentality back home, says Blanchette. “That allows him to redirect, to some extent, criticism that would otherwise be directed his way.”

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