Mike Pompeo’s July 23, 2020 speech declared a complete break with the nearly fifty-year policy of seeking to integrate the Chinese Communist Party system into the international community through economic ties and dialogue.
Distinguishing the Chinese people from the Communist Party, the speech advocated solidarity with freedom-loving Chinese citizens, while U.S. measures involving intellectual property, semiconductors, Huawei, and other high-tech sectors were interpreted as part of a broader strategy capable of forcing fundamental political change in China.

2020-07-29
On July 23, 2020, U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a major address at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in California on Communist China and the future of the free world.
The speech characterized the engagement policy pursued since the Nixon era as a failure and called for a fundamentally different approach toward the Chinese Communist Party.
The following is from an article by Sankei Shimbun Washington Bureau Chief Yoshinari Kurose, published on July 29, 2020 under the title “The U.S. Administration Seeks Political Change in Communist China.”
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2020-07-29
Pompeo’s speech declared a complete break with the “engagement policy” pursued by successive administrations for nearly fifty years in an effort to integrate the Chinese Communist Party system into the international community through economic ties and dialogue.
The following is from an article by Sankei Shimbun Washington Bureau Chief Yoshinari Kurose published today under the title “The U.S. Administration Seeks Political Change in Communist China.”
This article, in my view, once again demonstrates that the Sankei Shimbun is now the most sound-minded news organization in Japan.
It is no exaggeration to say that there is a world of difference between this reporting and the reporting produced by those who dominate NHK’s news division.
I have long argued that the difference reflects not only whether those involved hold what I regard as a self-denigrating view of Japanese history, but also whether they are entangled in Chinese honey traps or financial inducements, or are completely free of such influences.
The time has long since come, I believe, for people not only in Japan but throughout the world to understand this distinction.
The Trump administration appears to be seeking political change in China.
That was my immediate impression after hearing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s speech on July 23 at the Nixon Presidential Library in California.
Pompeo’s speech declared a complete break with the “engagement policy” pursued by successive administrations for nearly fifty years in an effort to integrate the Chinese Communist Party system into the international community through economic ties and dialogue.
In its place, Pompeo proposed a new form of engagement with China centered on solidarity with the Chinese people themselves.
He argued that the United States must build relationships with the Chinese people and empower them socially.
He described them as vibrant, freedom-loving people fundamentally different from the Chinese Communist Party.
He further argued that the Communist Party monitors and suppresses its people because, more than any foreign enemy, it fears that citizens speaking their minds would make it more difficult for the Party to retain its grip on power.
This rhetoric closely resembled the Trump administration’s criticism of Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela, states it characterized as authoritarian rogue regimes.
Distinguishing ordinary citizens from an authoritarian government and encouraging them toward independence and the acquisition of civil liberties is one traditional method of placing pressure on an authoritarian system.
One reason many Chinese citizens were not openly dissatisfied with the country’s police-state characteristics was that the Chinese Communist Party promised stable economic growth and material prosperity.
However, the article argued that China’s drive for global dominance in high technology depended on obtaining advanced technology and intellectual property from developed countries such as the United States, procuring semiconductor components that China could not produce domestically, developing and manufacturing products at low cost, and then penetrating world markets by exploiting the free economic system.
It further argued that China sought to establish what the article called a “vicious chain” in which telecommunications equipment supplied to Western countries could be used to obtain sensitive economic, security, and technological information for the expansion of Chinese power.
The measures represented by Pompeo’s speech were intended to break these practices and weaken the high-tech sector that was expected to serve as one of China’s principal engines of future growth.
First, the closure of the Chinese Consulate General in Houston sent a clear warning that the United States would not tolerate what the administration described as Chinese intellectual-property theft across the country.
In May, the U.S. administration also secured plans for Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the world’s largest contract semiconductor manufacturer, to build a plant in the United States, while successively introducing measures designed to make it more difficult for Chinese companies such as Huawei to obtain advanced components from TSMC and other international firms.
American strategist Edward Luttwak argued that semiconductors produced by TSMC were widely used in Chinese telecommunications equipment, computers, industrial machinery, and other products.
He emphasized that the U.S. measures could deal what he described as a “nuclear-scale blow” to China.
Meanwhile, a growing number of countries were beginning to support the U.S.-led exclusion of Huawei equipment.
If China failed in its attempt to establish high-tech supremacy and could no longer maintain economic growth, the possibility that Chinese citizens would turn away from the Xi Jinping government could become very real.
The article concluded that the U.S. administration’s China policy, potentially extending as far as fundamental political change, was only beginning to enter its decisive phase.