China again the bogeyman for Pompeo: China Daily editorial

In his wanton attack on China in a speech at Rice University in Houston on Friday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo once again spouted a farrago of clichéd, unfounded reproaches against Beijing, offering his listeners no fresh food for thought.

Considering farmers in the Midwest are angry at the US administration for being selected as the sacrifice in the unwarranted trade war it has launched against China, it is evident why Pompeo was rolled out to do his stale China-bashing act.

He has reiterated his accusations so many times, he can now deliver them to order without a teleprompter. And he seems happy to play the role of the administration's jester, hamming it up and working his audience like a true thespian treading the boards.

And there is the rub for the administration, for his claims would get short shrift from his audiences without the crowd-pleasing showboating. Yet with an election looming, spinning a tale about China is still seen as a vote winner.

What has prompted the US administration to portray China as threat is not what China has achieved, but that China has done it without following the course charted for it by the United States.

Pompeo and his like-minded colleagues never mention that the US, which is perched alone at the top of the value tree, has benefited tremendously from the fast growth of emerging market economies, particularly China, since their collective rise starting in the 1960s. This has enabled the US to maintain its borrowed prosperity for more than half a century without major reform of its growth model.

The US is where it is in the global order not because of the supremacy of the US system, but because it managed to seize postwar control of many key sectors of the global economy and grab the reins of global governance.

In other words, the lasting boom enjoyed by the US has come at cost of the developing and the least developed countries that have been forced to offer their natural resources, cheap labor and environmental health to sustain the US at the top of the pyramid.

The Belt and Road Initiative, involving 137 countries and 30 international organizations, which the US falsely claims is a debt creator for participating countries, has actually exposed how much development debt Western economies, with the US as the prime representative, owe to the poorer half of the world.

The US should realize, as President Xi Jinping said at the BRICS summit in Brasilia last week, that multilateralism-based economic globalization represents an irreversible historical trend, and that global affairs should be decided not by one country or a club of several countries, but by the whole world through discussion.