With the Biden Administration making efforts to boost its partnership with its European allies, China mocked the effort to build a broader coalition to counter it, saying Washington is “very ill indeed”.
China, the world’s second biggest economy has picked a fight with every neighbor its shares its border with and continues to block efforts to trace the source of the coronavirus-induced COVID-19 pandemic which supposedly leaked from its level 4 biolab facility in Wuhan.
US intelligence agencies have also accused it disregard for US intellectual property rights, including forced transfer and theft of US intellectual property and gross violations of human rights in its modern concentration camps in Xinjiang, which Beijing calls vocational training centres. These forced labor camps, much akin to Germany’s Nazi era concentration camps, house all sorts of prisoners including prisoners of conscience, political prisoners, religious sects, and Uyghur Muslims.
With the G7 rallying in support of NATO, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian hit back at US. efforts to rally allied support marking Beijing’s most pointed response since US President Joseph Biden began his first visit to Europe with a focus on drawing answers to challenges posed by an ill-mannered and rogue neighborhood bully that is China.
“The U.S. is ill and very ill indeed,” said Zhao. “The G-7 had better take its pulse and come up with a prescription.”
In a very dramatic response, earlier the Chinese mission to the European Union warned NATO that Beijing would not “sit back” in the face of challenges.
Despite its military adventure in India, which ended with the death of its soldiers, whose details it has yet to disclose, despite its military actions in the South China Sea, Beijing chose to do the ostrich acts saying, it doesn’t pose a “systemic challenge” to any country. A statement on its website also urged NATO not to exaggerate its military might.
The neighborhood bully had the gawl to urge NATO to push forward with dialogue and cooperation saying the bloc should work to safeguard international and regional stability.
The above comment came in the wake of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg telling reporters that the alliance is “concerned by China’s coercive policies, which stand in contrast to the fundamental values enshrined in the Washington Treaty” on which the bloc rests. Stoltenberg cited China’s rapidly expanding nuclear arsenal, military cooperation with Russia and its use of fake news and disinformation.
The United States is seeking to build a coalition against Beijing with Biden making modest gains in the G-7 summit.
Biden had urged the G7 to confront China on areas including forced labor and gross human rights abuses, as well as on its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure plan which has led many countries into a debt trap. Biden also raised the issue of China refusing access to its laboratories to determine the source of the Covid-19 pandemic.
The G-7 communique calls for a “timely, transparent, expert-led, and science-based” study led by the World Health Organization into the pandemic’s origins.
Several leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, pushed back these concerns saying the G-7 should not turn into an anti-China group.
At one point Merkel said, “this is not about being against something, but for something,” a rejection of any call to specifically line up against China. “It is the claim of the G-7 to have a positive agenda for many countries in the world, which still need to catch up”. Dismissing the G7 summit, China issued a statement from its embassy in London saying: “The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone.”
