US Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger gave a speech in Putonghua during a video conference hosted by London-based think tank Policy Exchange on Friday. Like many other high-level US officials, he attacked China’s system and so-called “ambitions.” Trying to be different, he focused on China’s “United Front” work while giving the speech in Chinese to show his distinctive understanding of China. Pottinger worked for Reuters and the Wall Street Journal as correspondent in China for about 10 years. As he did in his biased reports about China, he never abandons American and Western centralism. He refuses to view China as a country among equals. Instead he evaluates China by measuring how China can serve the US and the West. He acts like a “charge-hand” who tries to throw his weight around. Pottinger said the Communist Party of China (CPC)’s victory in the civil war “owed less to its combat prowess” against the Kuomintang than to the “emphasis on ‘United Front’ work.” He suggested that the CPC is using similar tactics to deal with the West. To the Chinese people this is absurd. The CPC and the Kuomintang engaged in a life-or-death war – and such a relationship is totally different from today’s major power relations in the era of globalization.
Since China’s reform and opening-up, Chinese society’s basic attitude toward the US and the West has been: Learning advanced technology and culture from them while resisting their interference in China’s internal affairs and their attempts to overturn China. Chinese people have never thought of reshaping the West. However, the US and the West have been obsessed with the desire to reshape China. They often publicly express such thinking and believe that China is as politically ambitious as they are. In the past decades, China’s united front work department has never been dominant in the country’s foreign affairs. It is devoted to promoting unity of people from different circles of China, encouraging overseas Chinese people to contribute to China’s reunification and development, and improving friendship between foreigners and Chinese. Which of these works is a malicious infiltration into the West? None. They are all things that any country can do and does do. It is the US that engages in a hostile “united front.” From the US secretary of state to defense secretary and its national security advisor, high-level US officials have publicly smeared China, urging the West and Asia-Pacific countries to take sides with the US to confront China. Pottinger’s most recent remarks are nothing but propaganda for an “anti-China united front.” By the contrast, China has never made any similar effort to form an anti-US or anti-West united front.
– Global Times
