NEW YORK: US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has said that the world is waking up to the threats from China and it will be confronted as never before by democracies.
Referring to the threats from Beijing to countries around the world, Pompeo said on Wednesday: “So long as the Chinese Communist Party continues to engage in the activities that it’s been undertaking now for an awfully long time, you’ll see them confronted in ways that they have not been confronted before, not only by the US but by freedom-loving democracies all across the world.”
Speaking at the Economic Club of New York, he cited India banning Chinese apps and said: “They did it because they could see the threat to the Indian people from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
“We’ve been working closely with the Indians across a broad spectrum of the – the full range of international partnership with them to assist them in making sure they had all the information they needed to make good decisions.” But he said India did not ban the apps because the US asked it to, but because it knew of the dangers it posed to its citizens.
In fact, the US has itself not banned any Chinese apps.
Pompeo said that the US had worked with India in building a coalition that included South Korea and Europeans to block China’s candidate Wan Binyang from becoming the head of the World Intellectual Property Organisation and instead have Singapore’s Daren Tang elected.
Leading the international charge against Beijing, Pompeo carefully laid out a distinction between the Chinese nation and people, making the CCP the focus of criticism.
He said that the US was working with India on issues relating to China because it and countries like Japan, Australia, South Korea and European countries, “are significant economies in the world with true national security capabilities who have a shared understanding of how nations ought to participate on the global stage and want the CCP to understand the expectation that they’ll participate with the same rules and reciprocity”.
President Donald Trump’s administration has been trying to turn US businesses away from China, especially having witnessed the supply chain disruptions during the COVID-19 pandemic originating there.
Pompeo said: “American businesses understand the political risk of operating in places like Hong Kong, and they’re seeing that their supply chains are potentially being poisoned by the human rights violations – literally the stain of the century in human rights violations is taking place in western China today.
“I think American businesses are saying this is not a place that we are comfortable with, and I’m watching as they’re making different decisions about how to allocate capital inside of their business and inside of their supply chains as well.”
Earlier at a news conference, Pompeo said he was confident that the world’s free nations will join together to face the challenges from China to India and other countries in Asia.
“I think that the whole world is coalescing around the challenge that we face (from China), I am confident that democracies, the free nations of the world will push back on these,” he said while replying to a question about Chinese confrontation with India in the Ladakh region.
He said that India was “an important partner of the US” and “I have a great relationship with my Foreign Minister counterpart (S Jaishankar). We talk frequently about a broad range of issues. We talked about the conflict that they had along the border with China, we talked about the threat that emanates from the Chinese telecommunication infrastructure”.
On China’s claims to the maritime territories of Asian countries and aggressive actions there, he said that the US “will use the tools we have, we will support all countries across the world that recognise that China has violated their territorial claims, their maritime claims as well. We will provide them with assistance”.
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