Mike Pompeo
Welcome to the Hudson Institute’s China Center.
I’m Mike Pompeo, 70th U.S. secretary of state, now chairman of the Advisory Board of this new Center.
As you can imagine there is a lot more job security in this gig then my last one, and the coffee is a lot better here than at Foggy Bottom as well. Our goal with these videos is pretty simple: To talk directly to the Chinese people about U.S.-China relations.
That’s what we’ll start doing with this series over the next few months, and we’ll keep it up. There’s a reason we’re doing this: The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t represent the Chinese people. It’s that simple. The CCP is a one-party, totalitarian political organization committed to a foreign, antiChinese ideology. It started out as a group of brutal, radical extremists.
And frankly, not much has changed. The worst mass murderer in history was Mao. His victims were mostly Chinese. The same is true of Deng Xiaoping, who murdered pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square.
And Xi Jinping continues that communist legacy even today。 There is no bigger enemy for the CCP than you, the Chinese people. I know this is true because all my interactions with the CCP leaders convinced me that what the CCP truly cares about is maintaining their stranglehold over the Chinese people. That’s it—that’s their paramount interest.
The CCP hates the United States because they are paranoid that the Chinese people will be inspired by the example of American freedom, the world’s oldest and most influential democracy.
I’ve gotten to know the work of brave Chinese freedom fighters like Cardinal Zen, Jimmy Lai from Hong Kong, and countless others who try to hold the regime accountable. There are a lot of heroes, in small ways and big, throughout China.
They’re the people who worship in secret houses, who commemorate Tiananmen Square, and who every day refuse to believe the CCP’s lies.
But the worst lie the CCP tells is that it speaks on behalf of China, and of Chinese civilization. And I think that the CCP knows it’s a lie. If Beijing thought it represented the Chinese people, it wouldn’t spend more on domestic repression and surveillance than it does on external defense. If it represented the Chinese people, it would hold a free and fair election tomorrow. But it won’t. The so-called People’s Republic seems to have a problem with its own people.
