Could VP's Upcoming Wilson Center Speech Sink a US-China Deal?

Here is more from Bloomberg:

Vice President Mike Pence gave a speech last year that sounded a lot like a new Cold War with China and quickly became one of the most important on Sino-U.S. relations by an American official in recent years. Next Monday, June 24, he’s giving another at the Wilson Center, a talk originally planned for June 4, the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. There’s a risk that an overly hawkish tone just days before the G-20 could cause Beijing to recoil and jeopardize any hope of a substantive leaders’ meeting.

The speech referred to above was given by Pence in October 2018 at the Hudson Institute, a think tank that has become a major anti-China platform.

Update: The speech has been postponed again.

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."

Trump Dumping Think Tanks

Even though a massive amount of think tankers from the Heritage Foundation and other conservative think tanks are on the Trump transition team, it doesn't mean that Donald Trump is actually listening to any of them.

Here is more from Politico:

While Donald Trump dines on frog legs with Mitt Romney and meets with a parade of lawmakers and governors in his gold-plated Midtown skyscraper, most of his transition staff are hunkered down in Washington, D.C., writing detailed governing plans for his first 100 days.

But so far, Trump and his inner circle have largely ignored those plans as they focus on top appointments and lean on the advice of politicians, CEOs and donors, rather than on their transition staff, say sources close to the transition.

The president-elect, meanwhile, has been more likely to set policy on Twitter than through consultation with his D.C. advisers.

The New York-D.C. transition divide reflects Trump’s tendency to focus on personnel and, especially, personality, over policy. Experts say that bent, combined with his improvisational style and the divisions between the teams will complicate his transition to the White House, making it less likely he’ll have a cohesive roadmap for governing on Day One. 

...former transition officials say Trump’s operation is unusual in the way it’s leaving so much of the policy and second-tier personnel appointments to D.C. transition team members, many of whom are volunteers with little power and no connection to Trump’s key advisers.

Trump has few real ties to Washington’s network of Republican policy wonks and is much more likely to take advice from son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Bannon, Trump’s incoming chief strategist, than from veterans of Republican presidencies.

The article goes on to list Mr. Trump's "inner core," which consists of Jared Kusher, Steve Bannon, Mike Pence, Reince Priebus, and Kellyanne Conway.  Think Tank Watch should note that of those five, only Mike Pence has any real connection to the think tank world.

To be sure, hundreds of think tankers will go into the Trump Administration over the next few months and years, and they will certainly influence policy, but by how much has yet to be determined.

Possible Trump Veep Pick Pence a Think Tanker

A little-known fact about Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R), a possible vice presidential pick for Donald Trump, is that he has a deep connection to think tank land.

From 1991 to 1994, Pence ran the Indiana Policy Review Foundation (IPR), a conservative, state-level think tank that was founded in 1989 by Craig Ladwig.

In fact, Pence apparently claimed in 2012 that he helped found the think tank.  In 2008 Pence said: "I was part of what we called the seed corn Heritage Foundation was spreading around the country in the state think tank movement.  We actually called our little foundation in Indiana the Indiana Policy Review Foundation, very much as a homage to Policy Review magazine of Heritage, and we modeled on the state level what Heritage had done before."

Policy Review was a conservative journal that was published from 1977 to 2013.  In 2001 it was acquired by the Hoover Institution, a Stanford University-based conservative think tank.

Here is more about the Indiana Policy Review Foundation from its own website:

Our mission is to marshal the best thought on governmental, economic and educational issues at the state and municipal levels. We seek to accomplish this in ways that:

• Exalt the truths of the Declaration of Independence, especially as they apply to the interrelated freedoms of religion, property and speech.
• Emphasize the primacy of the individual in addressing public concerns.
• Recognize that equality of opportunity is sacrificed in pursuit of equality of results.

The Indiana Policy Review Foundation is a non-profit education foundation focused on state and municipal issues. It is free of outside control by any individual, organization or group. It exists solely to conduct and distribute research on Indiana issues. Nothing written here is to be construed as reflecting the views of the Indiana Policy Review Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before the legislature or to further any political campaign.

The foundation’s white papers are intended to make scholarly research on Indiana issues more widely available to policy analysts and researchers. White Papers represent research in progress and are published to invite comment and discussion as preparation for their submission to academic journals and other professional publications. The authors are solely responsible for the content of their research and analysis.

But besides IPR, it is a little-known fact that Pence has been a non-staff member of the conservative Heritage Foundation.  Pence has spoken at Heritage on several occasions, including this 2005 talk on journalists, and this 2006 talk on immigration reform.  Pence has also written special guest posts for Heritage, including this one remembering 9/11.

Pence also has allies at Heritage, including policy analyst Katie Tubb, who was once at intern for Pence when he was in the US Congress.

In 2015, Heritage wrote a piece entitled "What Are Mike Pence's Prospects for a 2016 Presidential Run?"

Pence has also spoken at other think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute (AEI).  In fact, in 2005, Pence took part in an AEI conference along with Newt Gingrich, another possible VP pick for Trump.