‘Mission of our time’

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called on "free nations" to triumph over the threat of what he said was a "new tyranny" from China, in a provocative speech likely to worsen fraught US-China relations.

"Today China is increasingly authoritarian at home, and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else," Pompeo said in a speech on Thursday at the Richard Nixon presidential library in Yorba Linda, California.

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"If the free world doesn't change Communist China, Communist China will change us," he said, calling it the "mission of our time."

Speaking at the Nixon Library in President Richard Nixon's birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, Pompeo said the former US leader's worry about what he had done by opening the world to China's Communist Party in the 1970s had been prophetic.

"President Nixon once said he feared he had created a 'Frankenstein' by opening the world to the CCP," Pompeo said. "And here we are."

Nixon, who died in 1994 and was president from 1969-74, opened the way for the establishment of US diplomatic relations with Communist China in 1979 through a series of contacts, including a visit to Beijing in 1972.

In the major speech delivered after Washington's surprise order this week for China to close its Houston consulate, Pompeo called for an end to "blind engagement" with China and repeated frequently leveled US charges about its unfair trade practices, human rights abuses and efforts to infiltrate American society.

He said China's military had became "stronger and more menacing" and the approach to Beijing should be "distrust and verify," adapting President Ronald Reagan's "trust but verify" mantra about the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

"The truth is that our policies – and those of other free nations – resurrected China's failing economy, only to see Beijing bite the international hands that were feeding it," Pompeo said.

"The freedom-loving nations of the world must induce China to change ... in more creative and assertive ways, because Beijing's actions threaten our people and our prosperity."

Recalling remarks he made after meeting British leaders in London this week, Pompeo said "maybe it's time for a new grouping of like-minded nations, a new alliance of democracies".

Pompeo said "securing our freedoms from the Chinese Communist Party is the mission of our time," and America was perfectly positioned to lead it.

He also strongly criticized previous US administrations for being too complacent with China and US companies for being too compliant with whatever Beijing demands of them.

While some conservative commentators praised Pompeo's speech on social media and elsewhere, some other analysts were not impressed.

"How do you form a united front against China when the US is bullying its allies, trashing multilateral institutions and pushing an economic decoupling (from China) that no one else supports?" Scott Kennedy of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies said.

The Chinese foreign ministry yesterday said the speech by Pompeo on China disregarded reality and was filled with ideological bias.