Secretary Mike Pompeo accepts Hudson Institute's Herman Kahn Award on October 30, 2019 in New York City.

"We’re finally realizing the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party is truly hostile to the United States and our values."

On Wednesday night in Manhattan, Hudson was honored to present Secretary of State Mike Pompeo with the 2019 Herman Kahn Award. In his acceptance speech, Secretary Pompeo went beyond the typical niceties to lay out a clear and distinct vision for America's future with China — a future filled with hope, but also resolve.

Keep scrolling for the highlights of this cornerstone speech on US-China policy.

Speech Highlights

Key moments from Secretary Mike Pompeo's speech while accepting the 2019 Herman Kahn Award:

ON THE PEOPLE OF CHINA:

"We have a long-cherished tradition of friendship with the Chinese people. We have a Chinese American community here in America that we love and treasure. I’ve known them through business and personal ties; I’ve known many of them. But I must say that the communist government in China today is not the same as the people of China. They’re reaching for and using methods that have created challenges for the United States and for the world."

ON AMERICAN MISCALCULATIONS:

"We downgraded our relationship with our long-time friend, Taiwan, on the condition that the “Taiwan question” would be resolved peacefully. We all too often shied away from talking directly about the human rights issues there and we downplayed ideological differences, even after the Tiananmen Square massacre. We encouraged China’s membership in the World Trade Organization, premised on their commitment to adopt market reforms and abide by the rules of those organizations.

 

All too often, China never followed through. We hesitated and did far less than we should have when China threatened its neighbors like Vietnam, and like the Philippines, and when they claimed the entire South China Sea. Frankly, we did an awful lot in the hope that communist China would become more free, more market-driven, and ultimately, hopefully more democratic." 

ON THE SWAMP:

"I’ve talked to so many business leaders. U.S. companies that invested heavily in China were forced to comply with China’s terms. Beijing’s intransigence creates a permanent class of China lobbyists in the United States. Their primary job is to sell access to Chinese leaders and connect business partners.

 

Meanwhile, Beijing controlled and limited access to our diplomats, journalists, and academics when they were traveling to mainland China. They still do that today. If you saw the difference in how Chinese diplomats are treated and how American diplomats and the access they have, you too would find the absence of reciprocity deeply inconsistent with American values."

ON THE NBA PROBLEM:

"We know China weakens America’s manufacturing base by conducting massive intellectual property theft. I had a group of Fortune 500 CEOs in my office last week. The stories are staggering.

 

Now we know too that China threatens American freedoms by demanding our companies self-censor to maintain access to that Chinese market. We’ve all seen the stories recently of the NBA. The truth is Beijing ought to be free to run its own PR campaign; they’re a sovereign nation. But if we disagree, our companies ought to be permitted to have that disagreement. Silencing dissent simply is not acceptable.

 

When we see Beijing use coercion as a preferred tool of statecraft, it’s not good for those of us who believe in democracy and sovereignty as the fundamental norms that ought to dominate world commerce and the way nations interact. 

 

We know too and we can see China’s regime trampling the most basic human rights of its own citizens – the great and noble Chinese people. We’ve seen this in Hong Kong, where they need to live up to their promises and commitments, and we’ve seen it in the gross human rights violation of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang."

ON THE FUTURE:

"We don’t want a confrontation with the People’s Republic of China. In fact, we want just the opposite. We want to see a prosperous China that is at peace with its own people and with its neighbors. We want to see a thriving China where the Chinese business community transact business with the rest of the world on a fair set of reciprocal terms that we all know and understand.

 

And we want to see a liberalized China that allows the genius of its people to flourish. And we want to see a China that respects basic human rights of its own people, as guaranteed by its own constitution. But above all, it’s critical that as Americans, we engage China as it is, not as we wish it were."

Go Deeper: China's Western Censorship

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