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US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday called on "free nations" to triumph over the threat of what he said was a "new tyranny" of China.
"Today China is increasingly authoritarian in its country and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom elsewhere," said Pompeo.
"If the free world does not change communist China, communist China will change us," said Richard Nixon at the Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California.
Speaking the day after the State Department ordered China to close its Houston, Texas consulate, Pompeo laid out a stern vision of Washington's rivalry with Beijing in strident language reminiscent of the United States' Cold War with the Soviet Union. .
And in an extraordinarily virulent attack, he accused Chinese President Xi Jinping of being a "true believer" in the totalitarian "bankrupt" Marxist-Leninist ideology.
"His ideology informs his desire for decades of global hegemony based on Chinese communism," said Pompeo.
- Trump's hard line -
The speech marked a new level in the hard-line approach to China by the administration of President Donald Trump.
It was the fourth in a series of important policy speeches by top administration officials, including White House national security adviser Robert O'Brien, FBI Director Chris Wray and Attorney General Bill Barr, each of the which focused on one facet of China's alleged threat in ideology, espionage, and trade.
It also comes after Pompeo himself declared that China's geopolitical claims in the South China Sea are fundamentally illegal, and after the Pentagon dispatched two aircraft carriers to that region to underscore the point.
Pompeo said that Beijing has selfishly taken advantage of American and Western generosity by implementing reforms and joining the global economy in the past four decades.
He strongly criticized previous US administrations for being too accommodating to China and US companies for doing too much with what Beijing demands of them.
He said Beijing had broken international commitments on Hong Kong's autonomy, on the South China Sea and on halting state-backed intellectual property threats.
And he said those "failed promises" included not being frank about the start of the coronavirus outbreak that has now swept the world into a pandemic.
"We can no longer ignore the fundamental political and ideological differences between our countries, just as the CCP has never ignored them," he said, referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
"The free world must triumph over this new tyranny."
- New Cold War -
Pompeo made several references to the Cold War that saw Moscow and Washington face off, sometimes very tense, across the world for four decades after the end of World War II.
In dealing with China, countries will have to choose sides "between freedom and tyranny," he said.
The bilateral relationship between the superpowers has become more strained this week after Washington's abrupt order to close the Chinese consulate in Houston.
And on Thursday, the US Department of Justice announced allegations and arrests of four medical scientists and researchers at US universities.
All four were charged with visa fraud for allegedly lying about their ties to the People's Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party.
Pompeo said the consulate was closed because "it was a center for espionage and theft of intellectual property."
"China ripped off our precious intellectual property and trade secrets, costing millions of jobs across the United States."
On Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin called the consulate's action "an outrageous and unwarranted measure that will sabotage relations between China and the United States."
From NDTV News
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