In a speech at the Heritage Foundation on Wednesday, former U.S. Vice President Mike Pence called on the Biden Administration and the private sector to distance themselves from China and strengthen relations with Taiwan.

Pence was the keynote speaker at Heritage’s 2021 B.C. Lee Lecture, an annual lecture series funded by the Samsung Group to discuss issues of U.S. involvement in the Indo-Pacific region. The vast majority of Pence’s speech focused on the contemporary issues of China.

The former Vice President acknowledged that the Biden Administration has continued some of the policies of the previous administration, such as tariffs on Chinese imports, but he said that he believes Chinese leader Xi Jinping senses weakness from Biden and is therefore becoming more assertive.

Pence then laid out a series of recommendations for the Biden Administration to respond to the Chinese government’s increasing transgressions abroad. The first of these recommendations was to pressure the Chinese Communist Party to “come clean” about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, which Pence says most likely came from a Chinese laboratory.

“After four million deaths around the world and a year of unspeakable hardship, the American people and the world deserve to know exactly what the Chinese Communist Party knew, when they knew it, and the specific actions they took based on that knowledge,” he said.

Pence also called for the decoupling of the American economy from China in critical industries like pharmaceuticals, medical supplies, farmland, and infrastructure projects, in order to protect U.S. national security in future crises. He recommended that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) delist Chinese companies that refuse to follow proper U.S. accounting standards, in order to protect American investors.

On Taiwan, Pence called for the U.S. to negotiate a free trade agreement with the island nation, a proposal that has repeatedly seen bipartisan support in Congress as well as support from the Taiwanese government. He further encouraged the Biden Administration to hold responsible the Chinese officials who continue to strip freedoms away from the people of Hong Kong. Just days after Pence’s speech, the U.S. placed new sanctions on seven Chinese officials for their roles in Hong Kong’s overhaul.

The former Vice President also called on Biden to shore up the U.S. Navy and increase investment in the U.S. Space Force, noting that Biden has sought to decrease military spending in his budget despite China increasing their own military budget by 7% this year. Pence called for the U.S. to reassert its commitment to the Monroe Doctrine and seek to keep China out of the affairs of the western hemisphere.

Pence further recommended that the U.S. ban Confucius Institutes and prohibit the issuance of H1B visas to Chinese nationals employed at U.S. technology companies. “This is not because we don’t trust Chinese visa holders,” he said. “It’s because we don’t trust China’s communist government. We know that China often coerces its own citizens to participate in industrial espionage. It forces them to hand over trade secrets against their will.”

Finally, Pence recommended that the U.S. demand that the 2022 Winter Olympics be removed from Beijing unless they reveal their knowledge of the origins of the COVID-19 virus and end the human rights abuses against the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang region of China.

Pence then turned his focus on the domestic private sector, calling out “powerful business interests and celebrities in our own country” who aid and abet the Chinese government’s abuses in the name of profit.

“American business leaders preach such social justice at home while they profit from slavery abroad. They boast of their commitment to the environment while their facilities in China blacken the skies and choke our oceans with plastic. They criticize America’s founding fathers while lauding a regime that murdered millions of its own citizens during the Great Leap Forward and perpetrated the massacre at Tiananmen Square,” he said.

“The truth is, the China problem was made and manufactured right here in the USA,” Pence continued. “But the good news is that a problem made in America can be fixed in America.”

Pence recommended for consumers to stop purchasing Chinese imports, employers to stop sending jobs and factories to China, investors to stop investing American pensions in Chinese military-affiliated companies, and elected leaders to continue to build on the Trump Administration’s China policy agenda.

“We should never hesitate…to make access to the world’s largest economy contingent on respect for the basic principles of fair play and the rule of law,” he concluded.

Though Vice President Pence is no longer in elected office, his comments have the potential to sway the Biden Administration’s current approach to China because Biden––or one of his allies––will be facing a Republican opponent in the 2024 presidential election. With a supermajority of U.S. voters supporting a tougher stance on Chinese human rights abuses, potential Republican challengers showing their willingness to be hard on China could pressure President Biden to do the same today.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore on Flickr