Pence: China is trying to undermine Trump because it 'wants a different American president'

WASHINGTON - China "wants a different American president" and is working to undermine President Donald Trump and influence U.S. elections, Vice President Mike Pence asserted Thursday in a sharply critical speech that marked another escalation in rising tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Speaking at the conservative Hudson Institute, Pence accused China of using trade, diplomatic overtures and military expansion to spread its influence around the world and to work against U.S. interests. He called on American business leaders, academics and journalists to counter Beijing's global campaign and vowed that Trump "will not back down" in the face of China's challenge.

"President Trump's leadership is working; China wants a different American president," Pence said. "China is meddling in America's democracy."

The vice president's remarks served as the latest salvo from the Trump administration amid a deepening trade war with China and new military hostilities. Top White House aides have said the administration is developing new policies to mark a turn in the bilateral relationship away from cooperation in many areas and toward outright competition.

At the same time, Trump has continued to press Beijing to support efforts to pressure North Korea into relinquishing its nuclear weapons.

This week, a Chinese warship conducted a dangerous maneuver and sailed within 45 yards of a U.S. Navy warship in the contested South China Sea, where China has sought to establish maritime dominance in the crucial shipping corridor.

"We will not be intimidated and we will not stand down," Pence said, referring to the incident.

At a United Nations conference last week, Trump accused Beijing of trying to influence the election in retaliation for the escalating trade war in which both nations have enacted tariffs on more than $250 billion worth of goods. The president did not offer evidence of interference by Beijing, though administration officials told reporters that they viewed a number of Chinese actions as tantamount to interference.

Pence cast Beijing's efforts as a highly coordinated, "whole-of-goverment approach to promote its interests around the world, including in the United States.

On the election interference issue, Pence cited an advertising supplement purchased by Chinese state media in the Des Moines Register in Iowa as an one example.

"The supplement, designed to look like news articles, cast our trade policies as reckless and harmful to Iowans," he said.

Pence's speech amounted to a broad indictment of the methods and goals of what China insists is its peaceful rise to an economic great power. He said China is not being forthcoming about the real aims of its military expansion in the South China Sea and elsewhere and that it was cheating and effectively extorting U.S. firms while persecuting and subjugating Chinese people.

"Beijing now requires many American businesses to hand over their trade secrets as the cost of doing business in China. It also coordinates and sponsors the acquisition of American firms to gain ownership of their creations," Pence said. "Worst of all, Chinese security agencies have masterminded the wholesale theft of American technology - including cutting-edge military blueprints."

The vice president called on Google to halt development on "Dragonfly," a new search engine for the Chinese market which critics have said would allow information searches to more easily be tracked by the government.

The application "will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers," Pence said.

He also accused China of using "debt diplomacy" to trap other countries into political cooperation through "questionable loans" to nation's such as Sri Lanka and Venezuela.

Drawing applause while referring to Taiwan, Pence said that while the United States will continue to abide by the "One China" policy that recognizes Beijing's authority, "America will always believe Taiwan's embrace of democracy shows a better path for all the Chinese people."

In a wide-ranging interview on NPR on Thursday morning, Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai suggested the Trump administration had not shown good faith in negotiating with Beijing over trade.

"The U.S. position keeps changing all the time, so we don't know exactly what the U.S. would want as priorities," he said. "And, number two, I think there's been some attempt on the U.S. side to force something like the U.S. will get 100 percent and China will get zero. I don't think this is fair."

A new poll of data from 25 countries released this week from Pew Research Center found a widespread belief that China is a growing power, perhaps one that now rivals the United States in economic might, but that most people wanted the United States to retain its leading role in global affairs.

However, the poll also found very little confidence in the countries surveyed that the current American president would do the right thing in global affairs. Indeed, confidence in Trump was lower than for world leaders such as Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Emmanuel Macron, Russia's Vladimir Putin - and even Chinese President Xi Jinping.

But Pence sought to put China on the defensive over human rights, citing the persecution of up to 1 million Uighurs, a Muslim minority group in the western part of the country, who have been detained in "re-education" camps.

The vice president also criticized China for blocking U.S. media websites and making it more difficult for western journalists to secure visas, a move that Pence said came after The New York Times published critical stories about the wealth of Chinese leaders several years ago.

Although Trump and his aides have lashed out this week after the Times published a lengthy investigative report on the president's personal wealth, Pence declared that it was "great to see more journalists reporting the truth without fear or favor" about Chinese aggression and abuses.

Pence will represent the administration at a trio of regional summits in Southeast Asia, including the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in Papau New Guinea, in November. Trump, who attended the summits last year, will not attend this year, aides said.