WASHINGTON — China ‘‘wants a different American president’’ and is working to undermine President Trump and influence US elections, Vice President Mike Pence asserted Thursday in a sharply critical speech that marked another escalation in rising tensions between Washington and Beijing.

Speaking at the conservative Hudson Institute, Pence accused China of using trade, diplomatic overtures, and military expansion to spread its influence around the world and to work against US interests. He called on American business leaders, academics, and journalists to counter Beijing’s global campaign and vowed that Trump ‘‘will not back down’’ in the face of China’s challenge.

‘‘President Trump’s leadership is working; China wants a different American president,’’ Pence said. ‘‘China is meddling in America’s democracy.’’

The vice president’s remarks served as the latest salvo from the Trump administration amid a deepening trade war with China and new military hostilities. Top White House aides have said the administration is developing new policies to mark a turn in the bilateral relationship away from cooperation in many areas and toward outright competition.

At the same time, Trump has continued to press Beijing to support efforts to pressure North Korea into relinquishing its nuclear weapons.

This week, a Chinese warship conducted a dangerous maneuver and sailed within 45 yards of a US Navy warship in the contested South China Sea, where China has sought to establish maritime dominance in the crucial shipping corridor.

‘‘We will not be intimidated and we will not stand down,’’ Pence said, referring to the incident.

At a United Nations conference last week, Trump accused Beijing of trying to influence the election in retaliation for the escalating trade war in which both nations have enacted tariffs on more than $250 billion worth of goods.

The president did not offer evidence of interference by Beijing, though administration officials told reporters that they viewed a number of Chinese actions as tantamount to interference.

Pence cast Beijing’s efforts as a highly coordinated, ‘‘whole-of-government approach to promote its interests around the world, including in the United States.’’

On the election interference issue, Pence cited an advertising supplement purchased by Chinese state media in the Des Moines Register in Iowa as an one example.

‘‘The supplement, designed to look like news articles, cast our trade policies as reckless and harmful to Iowans,’’ he said.

Pence’s speech amounted to a broad indictment of the methods and goals of what China insists is its peaceful rise to an economic great power. He said China is not being forthcoming about the real aims of its military expansion in the South China Sea and elsewhere and that it was cheating and effectively extorting US firms while persecuting and subjugating Chinese people.

‘‘Beijing now requires many American businesses to hand over their trade secrets as the cost of doing business in China. It also coordinates and sponsors the acquisition of American firms to gain ownership of their creations,’’ Pence said. ‘‘Worst of all, Chinese security agencies have masterminded the wholesale theft of American technology — including cutting-edge military blueprints.’’

The vice president called on Google to halt development on ‘‘Dragonfly,’’ a new search engine for the Chinese market which critics have said would allow information searches to more easily be tracked by the government.

The application ‘‘will strengthen Communist Party censorship and compromise the privacy of Chinese customers,’’ Pence said.

He also accused China of using ‘‘debt diplomacy’’ to trap other countries into political cooperation through ‘‘questionable loans’’ to nation’s such as Sri Lanka and Venezuela.

Drawing applause while referring to Taiwan, Pence said that while the United States will continue to abide by the ‘‘One China’’ policy that recognizes Beijing’s authority, ‘‘America will always believe Taiwan’s embrace of democracy shows a better path for all the Chinese people.’’

In a wide-ranging interview on NPR on Thursday morning, Chinese Ambassador Cui Tiankai suggested the Trump administration had not shown good faith in negotiating with Beijing over trade.

‘‘The US position keeps changing all the time, so we don’t know exactly what the US would want as priorities,’’ he said.