Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s principal China policy adviser, Anhui-born Dr. Miles Yu, made a rare public appearance on Sept. 22 to reject the “multilateralism” approach advocated to the world by Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the U.N. General Assembly.
Yu, who has been labelled the number one traitor to the Chinese race in modern history by Chinese state media, said that Xi’s comments stemmed from a “lack of self-awareness.”
He said China’s ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is “isolated” with no true allies, apart from North Korea and Russia, which is playing “hard to get.”
He also commented about the CCP’s lack of trustworthiness as shown by its “brutal and semi-fascist” actions in Hong Kong.
Yu made the comments while addressing an online discussion about the implications of the CCP’s actions in Hong Kong, hosted by Canadian think tank the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
He stated: “Shared values—that’s the foundation for multilateralism.
“We (the United States) have countries like Australia, Japan, the UK, Canada, EU, NATO, and ASEAN organization countries—we all share the same values.”
He called on friends and allies all over the world that share the same values as the United States to “build an alliance of democracies to counter the China threat.”
“Just about every liberal democracy in the world recognizes China is a threat,” he said.
“Always keep in mind, China has none that can be trusted as a really true ally. So it’s very ironic yesterday to hear Xi Jinping at the U.N. to talk about China being the champion of multilateralism.”
Yu rejected Xi’s claim and called it “a complete reflection of lack of self-awareness.”
He said that the United States is “more multilateral than any other country in the world when facing the China challenge, which is global and existential,” but argued that "multilateralism has to have a goal itself.
“Parties, dialogues, and banquets [them]selves [are not] necessarily a kumbuya that will solve all the problems in the world,” he said, citing multilateral talks by previous U.S. administrations with five other parties that failed to move the dial on the North Korea problem.
He said that President Donald Trump had chosen a different approach, opting to talk to Kim Jong Un directly and having “neutralized him for a good three and a half years now.”
Yu went on to say that the goal for the United States regarding China and the region is the preservation of values like freedom and rule of law that have been extinguished in Hong Kong.
“China views the entire international system as this endless struggle between the Chinese socialism—socialism with Chinese characteristics—and the rest of the world. So they want us to forget the systemic, political, and ideological differences between the two systems,” he said.
Miles Yu, whose Chinese name is Yu Maochun, was born in China and came to the United States for graduate school in 1985. He is a professor of East Asian and military and naval history at the United States Naval Academy (USNA), and a key member of the State Department’s policy planning staff, which is known as the department’s internal think tank.
Many believe that Yu is the central figure in the Trump administration’s policy making regarding China. Secretary of State Pompeo described him as “a central part of my team,” while David Stilwell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs called Yu as a “national treasure.”
Yu’s tough stance against the Communist China has irritated Beijing.
In July 2020, Yu’s old school, Yongchuan Middle School in Chongqing—a mega city in Southwest China—chiseled his name off its wall of honor. Yu had been recognized for ranking first in China’s national college entry test for the humanities in 1979.
Yu responded on his social media account, “Taking my name off a genealogical chart that I have never heard of, and never cared about, seems bizarre. The farce crumbles under the weight of its absurdity.”
A ‘Grand Experiment’
In the online discussion on Tuesday, Yu also described Hong Kong’s situation since 1997 as a “grand experiment that has failed miserably.” He said that Hong Kong was an “experiment to test the validity of [the] Chinese Communist Party’s trustworthiness” which has failed, revealing to the world that they cannot trust Beijing.Beijing promised to maintain the “one country, two systems” for 50 years when the UK returned Hong Kong to Chinese rule it in 1997. But the communist regime has already gone back on its words, trying to impose communism and totalitarianism on the Hong Kong people.
Yu views the CCP’s “one country, two systems” as a “bankrupt idea” because of its own “inner contradiction.” He pointed out that “national unification” for China would be meaningless without “political freedom.” He cited the reunification of East and West Germany as an example, and also the Korean Peninsula.
“People would not be united under a totalitarian regime,” he said.
He added, “I think the people in Hong Kong have chosen the system of freedom and the rule of law, not the system of communist autocracy in the name of natural unification.”
He said that Communist China’s brutal crack down on democracy and imposing its National Security Law in Hong Kong has seen its “one country, two systems” model completely lose its “exemplary effect on Taiwan.”
