Pompeo's fact-twisting China speech versus the truth

6. Mike Pompeo: President Richard Nixon said "the world cannot be safe until China changes." The engagement the US has been pursuing has not brought the kind of change inside of China that President Nixon had hoped to induce. The old paradigm of blind engagement with China has failed. The US must induce China to change.

False.

Fact check: The US engagement with China is deliberate rather than blind, and serves the national interests of the United States. President Nixon promoted the normalization of China-US relations not to change China, but for the common interests of both countries. During his first visit to China in 1972, Nixon told Chinese leaders that he had come for US interests. In a toast at the Great Hall of the People, Nixon said "We began our talks recognizing that we have great differences, but we are determined that those differences not prevent us from living together in peace. You believe deeply in your system, and we believe just as deeply in our system."

-- The assertion that the policy of engagement with China pursued by successive US administrations has failed is just a rehash of the Cold War mentality. It turns a blind eye to all that has been achieved in China-US relations over the past decades, and shows ignorance of the historical process and lack of respect for the Chinese and American peoples. This is a political virus which is understandably questioned and rebuked by people in the United States and the international community.

-- As two major countries of the world, China and the United States have coexisted peacefully over the past 40 years and more. There have been no wars or sharp confrontations. Instead, both countries have overcome difficulties and kept developing. This is the greatest achievement of the engagement policy. China-US relations are of vital importance to the well-being of the two peoples and to world peace, stability and prosperity.

-- Pompeo's assertion ran contrary to historical facts, said former US senior diplomat Charles Freeman, who joined Nixon's visit to China in 1972 as an interpreter. "Those who don't understand what engagement achieved argue that it failed to change the Chinese political system, something it was never intended to do," he said.

-- Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said that Pompeo sought to commit the United States to a path that is bound to fail. It is not within America's power to determine China's future, much less transform it. How China addresses its challenges "will be for the Chinese people and their leaders to determine," Haass noted.

-- Paul Heer, an expert from the Center for the National Interest, a US think tank, pointed out that the 50 years of engagement with China, which Pompeo denounced as a failure, actually worked. Success in the Cold War against the Soviet Union, which was aided in part by China's decision to align strategically with the United States; China's reform and opening-up policy which greatly expanded US-China economic and cultural relations; decades of an endless supply of inexpensive imports and an export market for American farmers and manufacturers; a gradual Chinese embrace of multilateralism and more responsible proliferation behavior; and a dramatic opening up of Chinese society compared to what it had been.

-- Kishore Mahbubani, a professor at the National University of Singapore and a former Singaporean ambassador to the United Nations, said that when future historians look back, they'll be puzzled by the Western expectation that a country like China, with 4,000 years of political history, could be changed by a country like the US, with a history of fewer than 250 years. The assumption that the rest of the world will, over time, become just like the West is arrogant.

There is a fundamental difference between the United States and China, said Mahbubani, noting that the United States believes that it has the best society in the world and any other countries can be better off by copying it. However, the world has seen in the past few years how difficult it is to transform a society. When the United States exported democracy to Iraq, it ended in disaster.

Mahbubani said Chinese people have a different position, which is simply that only we Chinese can be Chinese; you choose the system that is good for you, and we choose our own. The reality is that China is now getting stronger and certainly also becoming more capable of execution.