Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo‘s China adviser says the world needs to wake up to the Communist Party’s hegemonic behavior and make its own rules to curb its aggression.
Miles Yu, a Chinese-American scholar who helped shape the Trump administration’s China Policy, said the Chinese Communist Party‘s strategy of threatening the United States is to demand that the United States not interfere with the regime’s “internal affairs,” including Hong Kong, Tibet and Xinjiang, calling them “red lines.
“This is only the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘red line,’ not a red line based on international law.” Yu Maochun said in an exclusive interview.
Recently, the Chinese Communist Party authorities’ top diplomat warned the Biden administration that “these issues concern China’s core interests and national dignity and touch the national feelings of 1.4 billion Chinese people, and cannot be touched, otherwise they will only end up causing serious damage to Sino-U.S. relations and the U.S. side’s own interests.”
Yu said that when the Chinese Communist Party tells countries that the issue of Xinjiang is a “red line,” what it really means is that “we want to put one million Uighurs in concentration camps, we want to torture them and suppress their freedom.
“And you, the international community … are not allowed to say a word of protest. Otherwise you are disrespecting us.”
Yu Maochun said that “the whole world needs to wake up to this kind of bullying” and rejects such statements.
Yu said that while the Chinese Communist Party claims that it is interfering with China’s “domestic sovereignty” by holding countries accountable for human rights violations in Xinjiang, this is not the case “because at some point you can’t really kill people and commit genocide in the name of sovereignty.
He urged the international community to set its own red lines against the aggressive behavior of the Chinese Communist Party and force the regime to abide by international rules.
Not doing the right thing but doing the right thing
According to Yu, the Trump Administration has revolutionized the U.S. approach to China by recognizing the nature of the Chinese Communist Party as “the central threat of our Time,” a description commonly used by former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Yu said previous U.S. administrations have continued to “wear down” the “flawed framework” for maintaining a “smooth relationship” with the CCP. That framework was guided by what he called “missionary sentiment”: the idea that economic engagement with Beijing would make China more democratic and a responsible, cohesive member of the world.
“What we’re doing is we’re trying to change the framework,” Yu says, “and we’re not focusing on how to do things right, but how to do the right things.” (Rather than focus on how to do things right. we focused on how to do the right thing.)
In Yu’s view, previous thinking about the CCP is “completely out of touch” because it fails to understand the nature of the regime that rules the Chinese people.
“We in the West, constantly, constantly underestimate the extent to which China is still a communist [state],” Yu said, adding that the CCP is the most self-righteous Leninist party in human history.
“Look at their domestic policies. Look at their international policies. Every major policy initiative is motivated by this ideology.” One only has to read the speeches of the Communist Party leaders to recognize this, he said. Western policymakers, however, are not taking it seriously.
“I think that was the most fundamental deficiency of U.S. foreign policy (before the Trump administration).” He said.
Yu Maochun, who grew up in the Chinese city of Chongqing during the Cultural Revolution, was able to get a more realistic assessment of the Chinese Communist Party because of his unique experience. he came to the United States as an exchange student in 1985. The Tiananmen Square massacre four years later prompted Yu Maochun to become a student advocate for China’s democracy movement.
He went on to pursue a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, and in 1994 became a professor of modern China and military history at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where he taught before moving to the State Department four years ago.
Maochun Yu was at the forefront of the department’s efforts to develop policy toward China. In Trump’s final year in office, Pompeo became the public face of the U.S. government’s hard-line stance on Beijing, imposing sanctions and other crackdowns on the Communist Party’s human rights abuses, suppression of Hong Kong freedoms, military aggression in the South China Sea, and the threat posed by Chinese technology.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Yu Maochun pose for a photo. (Courtesy of the U.S. Department of State)
Although once referred to as a “national treasure” by senior U.S. officials, Yu Maochun is treated with particular contempt by the Chinese Communist regime. The Communist media has called him the number one “traitor” in modern history, and the high school he attended in Chongqing has chiseled his name off the Wall of Honor.
Chinese Communist Party uses business permits in China to kidnap elites
Yu Maochun said that one of the Trump administration’s “crowning achievements” is its ability to minimize the “unhealthy influence” of the Chinese lobby, which in many ways is a major influence on the Chinese Communist Party. In many ways, the Chinese lobby is subservient to the CCP.
He said the Communist Party uses exclusive access to the Chinese market to influence U.S. companies and groups that want to do business in China, which also influences Washington lobbyists, who “have to go to the top of the Communist Party to get any access to China.
“That creates a very unhealthy, very dangerous class of people in particular.” He said.
These entrenched lobbies, Yu Maochun said, “have a tremendous influence on our foreign policy, especially on the process of making policy in China.”
Working with allies to counterbalance the Chinese Communist Party
The former adviser also offered a rebuttal to those who have criticized the Trump administration for leaning too far toward unilateralism in the execution of its policy toward China. Biden officials vowed to strengthen cooperation with allies to counter the Chinese Communist threat, calling it a distinction from the previous administration.
Yu said Pompeo has spent “most of his time” trying to raise global awareness of the Communist threat and build a coalition to deal with it.
“We put a lot, a lot of effort into putting together this multilateral coalition,” he said. The Trump administration, however, has met a lot of early resistance from other countries.
“Many of our friends and allies, at first, didn’t see it that way,” Yu Maochun said, adding that they accused the U.S. of being unilateral, “but they were the ones who were (most) unilateral because they didn’t want to act together.”
It wasn’t until after the COVID-19 pandemic that many countries woke up to the global threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party, he said.
After the pandemic, for example, the United States convinced NATO to respond to the Chinese Communist challenge in the Indo-Pacific region. This would have been unthinkable three years ago, Yu Maochun said.
At the same time, he believes the United States must be able to take the lead in confronting the Chinese Communist regime.
“When we take the lead, free nations will follow.” He said.
“It’s not because we’re arrogant. Rather, it’s because … we are capable … the United States is the country that can stop the expansion of the Chinese Communist Party on a global scale.”
Yu Maochun said the above views are his own and do not represent the views of the U.S. Naval Academy, the Pentagon or the federal government.
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