Under Trump, U.S. enters a new 'Cold War' with China
By Ishaan Tharoor
October 11 at 12:59 AM
The Trump administration is throwing down the gauntlet in front of China. It has already launched the first major salvos of a trade war. It approved a $330 million arms sale to Taiwan last month. And now its top officials are taking part in a rhetorical offensive against Beijing that shows few signs of abating.
In a speech last week at a conservative think tank, Vice President Pence called for a reset in U.S.-China ties. He attacked China for its alleged hacking and espionage attempts within the United States, its theft of U.S. technological secrets, its supposedly unfair trade practices, its bullying diplomacy abroad and its crackdown on the rights of ethnic and religious minorities at home. Pence argued that the White House now sees Beijing as a rival in an age of “great power competition” — a marked departure from previous administrations, which hoped to accommodate a rising China as a “responsible stakeholder” in the international system.
“The speech’s real significance was its promise that the United States will newly confront Beijing’s worldwide economic and strategic aggression, oppose its internal repression and compel the Chinese government to change its behavior on both fronts,” my colleague Josh Rogin observed. This new China policy, which marries economic nationalism with brute hawkishness, “would have been unthinkable coming from the Obama administration,” he wrote.
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Pence reiterated the message in a radio interview aired Wednesday. “China has largely abandoned the pathway of more freedom,” the vice president told right-wing radio host Hugh Hewitt, cataloguing a list of complaints about Chinese behavior, including the central government’s construction of “an unparalleled surveillance state.”
Elsewhere on Wednesday, a congressional commission that monitors human rights in China discussed Beijing’s sweeping repression of Uighur Muslims in the far-western region of Xinjiang. Reports indicate that as many as 1 million Uighurs and other minorities have been interned in “political reeducation” camps. “The commission’s co-chairmen, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Rep. Christopher H. Smith (R-N.J.), unveiled a bill that seeks to condemn the Chinese crackdowns in Xinjiang and urged the U.S. government to consider sanctions on Chinese leaders,” my colleagues reported.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2018/10/11/under-trump-us-enters-new-cold-war-with-china/
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