Yu Maochun, a senior official in the Trump administration, said that countries are united against the Chinese Communist Party and that the Communist Party is in a lonely situation of its own making. Pictured are Pompeo and Yu Maochun. (U.S. Department of State)
Since taking office, Biden has continued Trump’s hard-line policy against the CCP, while focusing more on uniting with allies in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region to surround the CCP. The Chinese Communist Party, which is struggling on all sides, has angrily criticized the U.S. for engaging in “gangster politics. Yu Maochun, a senior official in the Trump administration, countered that countries are united against the CCP and that the CCP’s isolation is of its own making.
Last month, the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom and Canada imposed coordinated sanctions on forced labor in China’s Xinjiang region. Washington also wants a “coordinated approach” with its allies on whether to participate in the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing.
The Chinese Communist Party is anxious about the international encirclement. China’s Foreign Ministry issued a statement to Reuters saying, “China firmly opposes the U.S. side’s gangster politics and anti-China blocs based on ideological lines.”
Yu Maochun, chief adviser for China policy planning at the State Department in the Trump administration, told the Epoch Times that the moves made by the U.S. and other countries against the CCP are based on international norms and values.
“It’s not that the United States has any ideology. The country that is most ideological is China under the Communist Party. So it is saying that it is looking at other countries in the world through its own tinted glasses. And the other countries in the world are collaborating and coordinating on the challenges of the Communist Party based on international norms, based on common principles and values.”
Yu Maochun believes that the U.S. strategy toward China is based on the behavior of the CCP and on the nature of the Communist Party itself.
“The U.S. condemned the CCP’s genocidal policies in Xinjiang as if the CCP felt it was ideology at work, which is not true. Basically any other Western country besides the United States has been critical of China’s genocidal policies and gross violations of human rights in Xinjiang. Are all those people ideological? Of course not. So the CCP is never receptive to criticism of its behavior from the world. When others accuse it, it always feels that others are specifically giving it trouble, and it never has this habit and instinct of admitting its own mistakes.”
On March 31, the United States and 13 other countries, including the United Kingdom, Australia and South Korea, issued a joint statement criticizing the Chinese Communist Party for concealing the Wuhan pneumonia outbreak and obstructing international investigations. In addition, Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, Canada and France have all recently joined the United States in sending warships to the disputed waters of the South China Sea, or are preparing to do so.
In a statement to Reuters, the Chinese Communist Foreign Ministry threatened U.S. allies, saying, “We hope the countries concerned will see where their interests lie and not become anti-China tools of the United States.”
Yu Maochun countered that many countries are “coincidental” in their opposition to the CCP and do not need the U.S. to agitate.
“In fact, the United States does not have any vassal states. We are all sovereign countries, and the United States respects the sovereignty of other countries. They have their own ideas, they have their own policies towards China. In fact, although many Western countries are the same democratic countries as the United States, they go in different directions in terms of specific politics towards China. After slowly dealing with the Chinese Communist Party more, they are coincidentally going with us.”
The U.S. Senate Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday (April 21) passed the cross-party “Strategic Competition Act” with a high vote. Senate Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.Y.), who sponsored the bill, said during the meeting that the scale, scope and urgency of the Chinese Communist challenge are unprecedented and require a full range of competitive policies and strategies to address it. The bill brings together an unprecedented cross-party effort to use all U.S. economic and diplomatic tools to develop an Indo-Pacific strategy that will enable the United States to truly confront the national security and economic challenges posed by the CCP.
Yu Maochun believes that the CCP’s challenges to the world are universal, and that everyone is simply coming together to deal with common challenges.
“You have, for example, the Chinese Communist Party’s theft of intellectual property, not just doing this to the United States, but to other advanced countries in Europe, as well. Britain, Germany have this problem. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and it’s not necessarily the United States that is unhappy with it for doing this. In fact, many countries are unhappy with it, and the actions of the Chinese Communist Party’s own government have led to the need for the world to join together to discuss a common approach, not that the United States is leading the charge to put the Chinese Communist Party to death, but in fact it is the policy of the Chinese Communist Party that has put itself in a lonely place.”
Yu Maochun said, in fact, it is the CCP itself that really engages in ideology. The CCP uses ideology to guide its domestic and foreign policies.
“Listen to this Xi Jinping, he speaks every day about the advanced nature of the Communist Party, he speaks about the superiority of socialism. Basically, seven out of every ten sentences he speaks are about ideology. Therefore, his entire national policy is guided by ideology, and domestic and foreign policies are guided by this ideology. The CPC has a saying that ‘the core force leading our cause is the CPC, and the theoretical basis guiding our thinking is Marxism-Leninism’. So the CCP always says that others are ideological, but in fact all that it instills in its own head is ideological theory.”
In his keynote speech at the opening ceremony of the Boao Forum for Asia annual meeting, which opened on Tuesday (April 20), Chinese Communist Party President Xi Jinping claimed that the future destiny of the world should be in the hands of all countries, and that rules made by one or a few countries should not be imposed, “The world wants justice, not hegemony.”
According to Yu Maochun, Xi’s words are very ironic.
“Or let him say all these words to the people of Taiwan, to the people of Hong Kong, and to all the countries around China. Don’t think you want to level the world, don’t think you want to be king and hegemon when you are economically strong. He says this to the United States because his own hegemony is resisted by the Western democracies led by the United States. Thinking that others are dictating to him, in fact the Chinese Communist Party itself is dictating.”
Senator Menendez, chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, said that strategic competition is certainly the right framework for looking at the U.S.-China relationship, “not because it’s what the United States wants or what the United States is trying to create, but because it’s the result of Beijing’s past and present choices.”
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