(Minghui.org) During an interview with Newsmax on December 14, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses the greatest threat to the American people and everyone else in the free world.
“President Trump came into office with a fundamentally different view from what Washington had done for a long time on foreign policy. We broke a lot of glass and we’ve had an enormous amount of success and made the American people safer as a direct result of that,” he remarked when talking with Rob Schmitt from the “Wake Up America” program, “‘America First’ doesn’t mean America alone. It just means that we think about the American people and their security as our first priority.”
Pompeo praised the Trump administration for its accomplishments in the past four years. “Whether it’s the work we’ve done to reorient the world to understand the threat from the Chinese Communist Party or the fact that we’ve now created enormous amounts of peace and stability throughout the Middle East and put Iran on its backfoot, the list of successes in the international space is very long under this administration’s first four years,” he explained.
When answering a question on the danger the CCP poses to the world, Pompeo said it is a “tremendous threat.” “Indeed, I 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,” he added.
Current CCP leader Xi Jinping has laid out a plan of “civil-military fusion,” namely, integrating the power of state-owned enterprises and military services to “create a hegemony to expand its reach, to expand its power.” To achieve this, the CCP uses commercial activity, including the theft of millions of American jobs, and poses a real risk to the American people.
Donald Trump is the first president who has addressed this issue in the past few decades and “this is not political.” “Both political parties looked away, bent a knee to the Chinese Communist Party. President 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,” said Pompeo.
During the interview, Pompeo mentioned a recent speech he gave at Georgia Tech, in which he talked about the CCP’s infiltration of American education institutions. He said that information from the FBI shows currently 360,000 Chinese students are studying in the U.S. Some of them are here just to study, while many return to China.
“We care deeply about the Chinese people. We want them to be successful,” explained Pompeo in the Newsmax interview, “But we can’t allow them to come steal secrets from our 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.”
What happens with education is just the tip of an iceberg, since the CCP has also been influencing U.S. governors, mayors, and city councilmen. Pompeo said, “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. We closed the consulate in Houston just aimed directly at this, right. They were running a spy operation out of what was supposed to be a diplomatic facility.”
Pompeo also discussed the CCP's tightening control domestically. One example is Hong Kong and through Twitter he recently praised Jimmy Lai, who had been arrested by the CCP. “Jimmy Lai is a true patriot. He cares deeply about the people of Hong Kong, as does our administration.”
Lai's arrest is just another example of how CCP leader Xi Jinping has broken a promise. A 50-year commitment of freedom for Hong Kong residents went by the wayside. “He’s now bashed it. He’s now taken it away with his national security law that caused the imprisonment of Jimmy Lai, who was simply trying to speak about basic rights for the people of Hong Kong,” said Pompeo.
That is why the U.S. administration pushed back on this and welcomed the United Kingdom along with other countries to join. “I fear that Hong Kong is becoming just another Chinese-run communist city, and that’s too bad. It’s inconsistent with what Xi Jinping had promised and it’s another example of the fact that you simply can’t trust what the Chinese Communist Party says,” he explained, “You have to verify every single thing that they assert.”
On the issue of the coronavirus pandemic, Pompeo reiterated the CCP’s responsibility. “If you watch what Australia’s doing and other countries – you see what India is doing. The world understands the simple fact that this virus, this Wuhan virus, came from China, and that the Chinese Communist Party covered up what they knew about the risk associated with this virus,” he said, “They allowed people to travel internationally when they should not have. They should have alerted the world to this.”
“And as a result, we’ve now had a million-plus people killed around the world, enormous economic devastation. The Chinese Communist Party bears a direct responsibility for this, and the world needs a collective response to it,” he continued.