Thursday, October 4, 2018

VP Mike Pence Delivers Major China Speech at Hudson

US Vice President Mike Pence will be delivering a major policy speech today at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank with close ties to the Trump Administration.

Here is a link to video of the speech, in which attendance is by invitation only.  Previews of the speech can be found here and here.  Axios recently reported that the Trump Administration was planning an administration-wide anti-China campaign.

In June, Hudson scholar Jonas Parello-Plesner published a report on the Chinese Communist Party's "foreign interference operations."

Last year, Chinese cyber attackers allegedly crashed Hudson's website, as the think tank was about to host an event with a Chinese political dissident.  And as Think Tank Watch previously reported, Hudson was recently the target of a cyber attack that allegedly came from Russia.

Here is a previous post about how many think tankers from Hudson and other think tanks have gone into the Trump Administration.

President Donald Trump recently said that Hudson's Michael Pillsbury is the "leading authority on China."  Pillsbury is the director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the think tank.

Update:  In the speech, Pence made several references to think tanks:
  1. He said China is employing a whole-of-government approach to advance its influence and benefit its interests. It’s employing this power in "more proactive and coercive ways to interfere in the domestic policies and politics" of the United States.  "The Chinese Communist Party is rewarding or coercing American businesses, movie studios, universities, think tanks, scholars, journalists, and local, state, and federal officials," Pence said.
  2. He said China provides generous funding to think tanks and scholars, with the general understanding that they will avoid ideas that the Communist Party finds dangerous or offensive.
  3. He noted that even scholars and groups that avoid Chinese funding are targeted by China, just as the Hudson Institute was last year.
  4. He noted that more scholars are "speaking out forcefully and defending academic freedom," and more universities and think tanks are "mustering the courage" to turn away Beijing's "easy money."  He added that the Trump Administration is confident that "more will join their ranks."