Bloomberg and others are reporting this week that President Trump and President Xi Jinping have escalated their rhetoric sharply. President Trump has actively suggested that China is behind a “disinformation and propaganda attack on the United States and Europe. It all comes from the top,” the president said in a series of tweets this week. He added that China was “desperate” to have former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, win the presidential race.
While the president has often blamed China for failing to prevent the pandemic now ravaging the global economy, he has previously been careful to maintain that his relationship with Xi remains strong. China’s foreign ministry has regularly fired back with similar charges, saying the Trump administration was looking to obscure the facts around the virus to deflect from its own shortcomings.
Now, however, the U.S. president and other Republicans have been ratcheting up efforts to paint China as the villain as the U.S. economy drifts into recession and the president’s handling of the crisis is being increasingly criticized. China has denied Trump’s claims that it was trying to damage his chances at re-election in November.
The feud has revived the worst-case scenarios concerning U.S.-China ties, Bloomberg said. It thinks the two sides are “edging” closer to confrontation “than at any point since the two sides established relations four decades ago.” From supply chains and visas to cyberspace and Taiwan, the world’s two largest economies are escalating disputes across several fronts that had quieted after they signed a “phase one” trade deal in January.
Last week, Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian sidestepped a question on President Trump’s tweets while attacking Secretary of State Michael Pompeo for his comments about Taiwan and Hong Kong. “Who’s been doing everything possible to ensure people’s lives and health and to promote international anti-virus cooperation?” he said. “The answer is clear as day. The world is a fair judge.”
A day earlier, the Chinese military condemned a rare message from Pompeo to Taiwan’s president as “wrong and very dangerous,” vowing to defend Beijing’s claim to the democratically ruled island.
Hours later, the White House issued a broad critique of China’s economic and military policies in a report to Congress without detailing specific actions the U.S. will take in response.
The U.S. Senate also overwhelmingly approved legislation Wednesday that could lead to Chinese companies such as Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Baidu Inc. being barred from listing on U.S. stock exchanges. The Republican-controlled upper chamber had already passed a bill this month that would impose sanctions on Chinese officials over human rights abuses against Muslim minorities.
The U.S. president, who had repeatedly praised Xi’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak early on, has passed up recent opportunities to criticize the Chinese president directly. During a TV appearance on May 3, the president described Xi as a “strong” leader with whom he had a good relationship.
This week, however, President Trump accused “some wacko in China” on Twitter of deflecting responsibility for the spread of the coronavirus, without elaborating. He accused China of “mass worldwide killing.”
Although it was unclear who the President’s reference included in either tweet, Hu Xijin, the editor-in-chief of the Communist Party’s Global Times newspaper, denounced U.S. administration officials as “political hooligans” who don’t care about the lives of more than 100,000 Americans. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian hewed closely to the usual talking points in his agency’s regular briefing Wednesday.
Hu pushed back against Trump’s “wacko” remark in a subsequent tweet, saying “I have never heard of such a wacko in China making this statement” and speculating that the person is “fictional.” He later said Chinese internet users wished President Trump would be re-elected, saying he promotes “unity in China” and makes international news “as fun as comedy.”
So, we will see. While this “back and forth” seems unlikely to lead directly to more serious confrontations just now, it certainly doesn’t offer any clear path to declining tensions and a better climate for trade and global market recovery.
In the current political and economic climate, the issue of how the coronavirus outbreak was begun and managed in each country likely will continue to be extremely fraught. So the current spat holds at least some danger for both sides and should be watched closely to prevent accidentally crossing the line to a more costly confrontation, as such wars of words sometimes do, Washington Insider believes.
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