Our Broken Engagement with China - Mike Pompeo

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National Review

 

 

In July the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100th anni­versary with familiar totalitarian pageantry: displays of military hardware, cheering red-scarved youth, and a nationwide crackdown on dissidents to ensure “political security.” The cult of personality that CCP general secretary Xi Jinping has assiduously built for himself was also on full display, as the unelected supreme leader of China delivered a speech wearing a drab tunic commonly referred to as a “Mao suit.” The symbolism Xi was trying to convey to the Chinese people with his garb was obvious: I am equal in significance to Chairman Mao as a leader. To the rest of the world, the message in Xi’s speech was just as overt: Any foreign force that attempts to “bully, oppress, or subjugate” China “will certainly be battered and bloodied in collision with the Great Wall of Steel built by 1.4 billion Chinese people.”

 

Some might dismiss these words as pure rhetoric, but we must take them seriously. Xi’s actions since taking power match his language — and then some. A century after Vladimir Lenin’s Comintern helped found the CCP, it continues to espouse the same Marxist-Leninist philosophy that served as the warped intellectual justification for brutalizing the Chinese people in the 20th century — millions were killed under Maoist rule — and the 21st — witness the ongoing genocide against Uyghur Muslims in China’s Xinjiang Province. This ideology is also the foundation for the CCP’s ongoing drive for China to replace America as the world’s true great power and establish the CCP’s model of governance as the norm for all nations.

The ideological color of the CCP’s centennial celebration therefore reaffirmed another truth: The Trump administration was right to break from a nearly 50-year-old policy of unqualified American engagement with China. By replacing unalloyed optimism with sharp-eyed skepticism, the Trump administration initiated a necessary, historic shift to better protect American security, prosperity, and freedoms from Beijing’s predations — a shift that must continue.