WASHINGTON: As US-China tensions continue to worsen with each passing day, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo on Monday (local time), said that Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party “is poisoning the well” of the US’ higher education for its own ends.
This comes after Pompeo termed China’s Communist Party as the “central threat of our time”, while highlighting efforts by Chinese security services to pressure and recruit Chinese academics and students as spies.
“Americans must know how the Chinese Communist Party is poisoning the well of our higher education for its own ends, and how those actions degrade our freedoms and our national security,” Pompeo tweeted.
Pompeo earlier on Monday reiterated that he would evaluate the Chinese Communist Party “as the greatest threat” to the security of the American people and indeed the free world of any of them that are out there.
“There’s a leader, General Secretary Xi Jinping, who is intent upon using the power of state-owned enterprises, their military services all together in this thing they call civil-military fusion to create a hegemony to expand its reach, to expand its power. It does through using commercial activity, including the theft of millions of American jobs. These are the kind of things that pose real risk to the American people,” Pompeo said in an interview with Rob Schmitt of Wake Up America on Newsmax.
Pompeo stated that the US can’t allow them (the CCP) to come to steal secrets from leading research institutions, places like Georgia Tech.
“We can’t allow the Confucius Institutes to act in ways that work against the American people. Those are the kind of things that President Trump has taken on. We’re beginning to have success. There’s an awful lot more work left to be done,” he said.
The Secretary of State said that both political parties looked away, “bent a knee to the Chinese Communist Party” adding, “President (Donald) Trump said enough and we’ve begun to turn the corner and build out a coalition all around the world of democracies and free-market economies to push back against this threat.”
With regard to seeing any direct evidence that China or maybe another foreign power interfered in the 2020 -presidential election, Pompeo said that he hasn’t seen any but the CCP is trying to influence candidates and the way they think about China,
“No, I haven’t seen interference as a direct matter. (But) Make no mistake about it: They are trying to influence the way our elected officials and our candidates think about China and that – that’s likely to continue until administrations like ours work hard, push back,” he said.
China and the US are at loggerheads since President Donald Trump took office over many issues including trade, India-Pacific, coronavirus and treatment of Uyghur Muslims. The tensions between the two countries have escalated in recent times.
Earlier this month, Pompeo, announced sanctions against 14 vice-chairpersons of the National People’s Congress over the controversial national security law imposed on Hong Kong, and also designated China in its list of ‘Countries of Particular Concern’ (CPC) for violations of religious freedom.
Prior to that, John Ratcliffe, US Director of National Intelligence (DNI), in an opinion piece on The Wall Street Journal, wrote: “If I could communicate one thing to the American people from this unique vantage point, it is that the People’s Republic of China poses the greatest threat to America today and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom worldwide since World War II.” (ANI)
