US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Photo: IC

As China spares no efforts in its battle against the novel coronavirus pneumonia outbreak, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo won't give up smearing and attacking China. This is nastier than adding insult to injury and reflects Pompeo's anti-China paranoia.

At the National Governors Association meeting in Washington DC on Saturday, he warned governors of US states and territories to "adopt a cautious mind-set" when doing business with China, saying China was using US openness to "gain advantage over us at the federal level, the state level and the local level."

To briefly summarize his speech, it would be: China is bad! You (governors of US states and territories) must watch out!

Pompeo's speech demonstrated his persistent position toward China. Be it viewpoint or content of the speech, he has conveyed it many times on various occasions. But like no other time before, this speech was delivered to state governors. By doing so, Pompeo had a more malicious intention. 

Some analysts believe that the speech might serve as political mobilization by Pompeo to urge state governors to be on their guard against China. Strategic competition between China and the US has begun to spread to the local level.

As we all know, the US is a federal system and each state has a fair amount of autonomy. Different states hold different views toward China which may also differ with the attitude of the federal government. Some states have maintained close ties and friendly cooperation with China and do not see eye to eye with the China policy of the federal government which has largely been influenced by extreme and conservative politicians like Pompeo. 

Obviously, Pompeo is unhappy about this. He took the opportunity to find fault with state governors who keep a positive attitude toward China and lobbied all governors to side with his China policy. This is destructively misleading.

Pompeo still sees things through the lens of a CIA director and misinterprets and slanders China. He is used to lying, cheating and stealing. So he thinks everybody is like him. In his rhetoric, he imagined China's purely cultural organization as something like a branch of the CIA, and described Chinese students and scholars as intelligence agents. His mind is filled with nasty political schemes.

Anybody with basic rationality will not buy Pompeo's groundless slander against China. Pompeo has done his utmost to accuse China and drive a wedge between China and the world, but his efforts have produced little effect. Even US allies barely echo his views, as they have their own judgment.

Inside the US, things might be complicated. McCarthyism is reviving. That Pompeo frequently emphasizes US national security will to a certain extent have a chilling effect and impede China-US relations.

But there is no need to overstate Pompeo's destructive energy. The healthy development of China-US relations and bilateral cooperation - rather than confrontation - is in the fundamental interests of both countries. No matter how insanely Pompeo acts against China, this fact remains unchanged. Only a limited number of US people take the side of Pompeo.

We cannot control Pompeo's mouth. It is almost certain that he will continue to launch attacks against China. What China can do is to keep moving forward until it steps out of Pompeo's firing range.