BEIJING: Beijing slammed US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Thursday for a speech it said had "viciously attacked" China.
In the latest hawkish take on China by President Donald Trump's administration, Pompeo Wednesday called Beijing "truly hostile" to the United States, and vowed to ramp up pressure on China on multiple fronts.
In response, Beijing rounded on his comments Thursday, which it said revealed "arrogance and fear."
"This deliberate distortion of the facts and slandering of China's domestic and foreign policies fully exposes the deep political bias and anti-communist mindset of a small number of US politicians," said foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang at a press briefing.
"Pompeo's speech viciously attacked the Chinese Communist Party and the Chinese government," added Geng.
In his talk at the conservative Hudson Institute in New York, Pompeo highlighted China's clampdown on Hong Kong protests and incarceration of Uighur Muslims, and said Beijing was seeking international domination.
Rights groups say more than one million Uighurs and other mostly Muslim ethnic minorities have been rounded up in internment camps in Xinjiang.
After initially denying their existence, Beijing now defends the camps as "vocational education centres" that counter religious extremism and terrorism.
"The Chinese Communist Party is offering its people and the world an entirely different model of governance -- it's one in which a Leninist party rules and everyone must think and act according to the will of the Communist elites," Pompeo said.
"That's not a future that I want and it's not a future that the freedom-loving people of China" want, he said.
At a dinner attended by Henry Kissinger, the apostle of realpolitik who negotiated the US normalisation of ties with Beijing, Pompeo said Washington had long been too easy on China in hopes that it would transform.
"Today we're finally realising the degree to which the Chinese Communist Party is truly hostile to the United States and our values," Pompeo said.
Pompeo nonetheless said that the United States did not seek confrontation but rather still wanted to encourage a more "liberalised" China.
His remarks come amid a simmering trade war between the two countries, which Trump has voiced hope of resolving.