Pompeo's China bashing is nonsensical

Note: The following article is taken from the Chinese-language "Commentaries on International Affairs".

One thing that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been doing in the year since he was sworn in is to insult and slander China wherever he goes. Whether it’s Latin America, Asia, Africa, or Europe, and no matter what the theme of his visit is, he always shifts his focus to attacking China, making him sound like a broken record.

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo speaks at a press briefing at the State Department in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, June 10, 2019 about the agreement the United States struck with Mexico to avert President Trump's threatened tariffs. [Photo: IC]

In a recent television interview, Pompeo accused China’s government of hampering the freedom of religious belief of local people in China's Xinjiang region, by setting up what he called "re-education camps" to detain people of ethnic minorities. These "re-education camps" are actually vocational training centers designed to help the small number of people affected by terrorism and extremism to re-integrate into society by learning the country's common language and laws, as well as vocational skills. Thanks to this work, no violent terrorist incidents have occurred in Xinjiang in the past three years.

There are 24,400 mosques in Xinjiang, one for every 530 Muslim residents. In contrast, the number of mosques in the United States is less than one-tenth of that in Xinjiang. Last year, more than 150 million tourists visited Xinjiang, an increase of 40 percent over the previous year. Among them, more than 2.4 million were from outside China, up nearly 11 percent over the year. If the situation in Xinjiang was really as bad as it has been described by Pompeo, would there have been such a big number of foreign visitors?

The U.S. Secretary of State has also been smearing China's Belt and Road Initiative, saying it had hampered the sovereign rights of participating countries. Despite this accusation, 6,000 representatives from 150 countries and 92 international organizations, including more than 50 representatives from the United States, attended the second Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation in Beijing in April. This vote of confidence cast by the international community for the Belt and Road Initiative has proved the absurdity of the allegation Pompeo has made against the initiative.

During his recent visits to Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and Britain, Pompeo tried to intimidate America’s allies with claims that by using technology from China they risk having their privacy breached. But when he was asked about this supposed threat during an interview by CNBC in May, at no point was he able to provide any evidence that Huawei posed a threat to America’s national security. It perhaps slipped his mind that the United States had previously been caught eavesdropping on Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel, the leader of a country that had adopted American technology. This helps to explain why, when Pompeo threatened that the United States would reduce the sharing of information with countries using Huawei technology and equipment, Germany’s Foreign Minister Heiko Maas responded that Germany would not exclude a company from bidding to build the country’s 5G network as long as it complies with Germany’s security standards.

Having been the first person to take on the role of America’s top spy and then its top diplomat, Pompeo has been described by some as playing the role of both secretary of state and CIA director. Speaking at a university on April 15, he said, "I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment." These are the traits that Pompeo has brought to his new job as America’s top diplomat.

Martin Wolf, the chief economics commentator at the Financial Times, said in a recent article that "The disappearance of the Soviet Union has left a big hole. The 'war on terror' was an inadequate replacement. But China ticks all boxes. For the U.S., it can be the ideological, military and economic enemy many need." And the historian Stephen Wertheim has written that Washington adopted an anti-China policy out of its anxiety that the United States must suppress China in every way possible lest its leading role in the world be challenged. This is just the kind of extremist idea held by people like Pompeo.

But Pompeo also has more personal reasons for smearing China. According to several American media reports, Pompeo intends to run in the 2020 Kansas state senate election, having previously served three terms as a member of the Kansas House of Representatives. In a bid to achieve his political ambitions, he has launched filthy attacks on China in order to establish a tough image for himself outside of the White House.

As the world's only superpower, the United States urgently needs a top-level professional diplomat instead of a broken record repeating the same old lies about China. Pompeo's nonsensical arguments about the so-called China threat only lead to the United States becoming more isolated from the rest of the world.