Mike Pompeo urges “free world” to triumph over China’s “new tyranny”

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday called on “free nations” to triumph over the threat of what he said was a “new tyranny” from China.

“Today, China is increasingly authoritarian at home, and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else,” Pompeo said.

“If the free world doesn’t change Communist China, Communist China will change us,” he said at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California.

Speaking a day after the State Department ordered China to shut its Houston, Texas consulate, Pompeo laid out a stark view of Washington’s rivalry with Beijing in strident language that recalled the US Cold War with the Soviet Union. And in an uncommonly virulent attack, he accused Chinese President Xi Jinping of being a “true believer” in the “bankrupt” totalitarian Marxist-Leninist ideology.