BEIJING (Associated Press) – China launched a violent attack on the United States and NATO on Wednesday, days before a meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian’s remarks underscore the increasingly strained relationship, along with China’s increasingly confrontational approach to foreign relations that firmly rejects criticism.
At the NATO summit last week In Spain, Blinken accused China of “seeking to undermine the rules-based international order”.
In his comments on Wednesday, Zhao said that “the so-called rules-based international order is actually a family rule set up by a handful of countries to serve the self-interest of the United States.”
He said Washington “only adheres to international rules as it sees fit,” adding that NATO “must abandon its blind belief in military power.”
US-China relations are dominated by differences on trade and human rights issues to Taiwan and Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Meanwhile, China has refused to condemn Russia’s four-month-old war against Ukraine, criticized sanctions imposed by NATO members on Moscow, and accused Washington and its allies of fomenting the conflict.
Russia and China have strengthened political, economic, and military ties, while aligning their foreign policies to oppose the influence of liberal democracies. Weeks before the Russian invasion in February, Chinese leader Xi Jinping hosted his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at a meeting in which they pledged a “borderless” partnership.
At its summit, NATO for the first time identified China as one of its strategic priorities for the next decade.
Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said after introducing the 10-Year Strategic Concept.
In his remarks at Wednesday’s daily press conference, Zhao said the United States is “working closely with NATO to stoke competition with China and fuel collective confrontation.”
“The history of NATO is the history of creating conflicts and waging wars … arbitrarily waging wars and killing innocent civilians, to this day,” Zhao said. “The facts have proven that it is not China that is posing a systematic challenge to NATO, rather, it is NATO that is bringing a looming systemic challenge to global peace and security.”
Blinken is expected to meet with Wang on Saturday at a meeting of G20 foreign ministers The leading rich and developing countries of the Indonesian island of Bali.
