US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's claim that China is following a bankrupt ideology is a simplistic declaration not based on reality, said an article in The South China Morning Post, which also stressed that "results speak louder than empty talk."

Pompeo, in a speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in July, launched a fusillade of ill-founded attacks, inciting an ideological hatred for China and the Communist Party of China, against the backdrop of the United States becoming the worst-hit country by COVID-19 and struggling to cope with a severe economic fallout during the pandemic.

The opinion piece carried in The South China Post on Tuesday listed some key indicators of China's rapid economic development. "China has propelled its per capita GDP from $156 dollars in 1978 to more than 10,000 dollars last year."

In terms of China's economic reform and opening up, the report referred to its some 170 national high-tech industrial zones, together with many others at provincial and local levels, starting from Beijing's Zhongguancun in 1988, and its expansion of free trade zones from the first in Shanghai in 2013 to 18 more last year.

"China's economic system is eclectic, not limited by ideology. The Communist Party retains its vitality through dynamic evolution," it said.

In the United States, meanwhile, average citizens face decades-long stalled wages, expensive but inefficient health care, and insecure jobs, the commentary pointed out.

Resulting in more than 5 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and over 160,000 related deaths, the health crisis has laid bare the world's largest economy's many socioeconomic problems, climaxing with mass protests across the country as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, it said.

"The US cannot win any new Cold War by demonising an ascendant China ... It can only win by putting its own house in order and setting a good example," it said.

"It is the US' empty rhetoric that is truly bankrupt," the article added.