We must change China or China will change us, Pompeo warns
The United States has called on Australia and other nations to demand accountability from Beijing, warning that “if the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us.”
In a strongly worded speech delivered as the relationship between Beijing and Washington plummeted to new lows this week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo declared that “the old paradigm of blind engagement” with China had failed.
Mike Pompeo: "If the free world doesn’t change communist China, communist China will change us."Credit:Getty
America and its allies needed to set a new course “if we want to have a free 21st century", Pompeo said.
“The truth is that our policies - and those of other free nations - rejected China’s falling economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that fed it,” he said at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California.
“But even now, some are insisting we preserve the model of dialogue for dialogue’s sake… We’ll keep talking. But the conversations are different these days.”
The setting of the speech was highly symbolic. Present Nixon opened diplomatic relations between the US and China in 1972, an achievement long celebrated by the Republican Party. The speech marked a wholesale re-evaluation of China's place in the world since then.
Pompeo’s comments came less than two days after the US took the extraordinary step of demanding the shut down of the Chinese Consulate in Houston, resulting in consular staff burning documents in metal barrels as soon as they learnt they were about to be kicked out.
Highly symbolic setting: Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, left, tours the Richard Nixon Presidential Library with Hugh Hewitt, president and CEO of the Nixon Foundation.Credit:AP
Beijing hit back immediately, calling the move “unprecedented” as it weighs up shutting US missions in China in retaliation for the closure.
But Pompeo was undeterred yesterday, declaring that the shutdown was ordered in Houston because “it was a hub of spying and IP theft.”
He also singled out telecommunications giant Huawei - where some staff now face visa restrictions from entering America - as a national security threat; and blamed China for coronavirus spiralling out of control in the US.
“We now know that if our companies invest in China, they may wittingly or unwittingly support the Communist Party’s gross human rights abuses,” he said.
Pompeo said that the US and other nations had “opened our arms” to Chinese citizens, only to see the CCP “exploit our free and open society.”
“We gave the Chinese Communist regime special treatment, only to see the CCP insists on silence over its human rights abuses as the price of admission for Western companies in China.”
“We, the free nations of the world, must induce change in the CCP’s behaviour in more creative and assertive ways, because Beijing’s actions threaten our people and our prosperity."