Trump talks tough on China, virus

WASHINGTON: China has no interest in interfering in the US presidential election, it said yesterday, after President Donald Trump said he believed Beijing would try to make him lose his November reelection bid.

‘‘The US presidential election is an internal affair; we have no interest in interfering in it,’’ Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang told reporters during a daily briefing.

‘‘We hope the people of the US will not drag China into its election politics.’’

In an interview yesterday Trump said, ‘‘China will do anything they can to have me lose this race’’, adding that he believed Beijing wanted his Democratic opponent, Joe Biden, to win the election to ease the pressure Trump had placed on China over trade and other issues.

Trump said he was looking at different options in terms of consequences for Beijing over the virus.

‘‘I can do a lot,’’ he said. He has been heaping blame on China for a global pandemic that has killed at least 60,000 people in the United States according to a Reuters tally, and thrown the US economy into a deep recession, putting in jeopardy his hopes for another fouryear term.

The Republican president, often accused of not acting early enough to prepare the US for the spread of the virus, said he believed China should have been more active in letting the world know about the virus sooner.

Asked whether he was considering the use of tariffs or even debt writeoffs for China, Trump would not offer specifics.

‘‘There are many things I can do. We’re looking for what happened,’’ he said.

The trade deal he concluded with Chinese President Xi Jinping aimed at reducing chronic US trade deficits with China had been ‘‘upset very badly’’ by the economic fallout from the virus, he said.

A senior Trump Administration official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Wednesday that an informal ‘‘truce’’ Trump and Xi essentially agreed to in a phone call in late March now appeared to be over.

The two leaders had promised their governments would do everything possible to cooperate to contain the coronavirus. But recently Washington and Beijing have traded increasingly bitter recriminations over the virus.

However, Trump and his top aides, while stepping up their antiChina rhetoric, have stopped short of directly criticising Xi, whom the US president has repeatedly called his ‘‘friend’’.

Trump also said South Korea had agreed to pay the US more money for a defence cooperation agreement but would not be drawn on how much.

‘‘We can make a deal. They want to make a deal,’’ he said.

‘‘They’ve agreed to pay a lot of money. They’re paying a lot more money than they did when I got here’’ in January 2017.

The US stations roughly 28,500 troops in South Korea, a legacy of the Korean War. — Reuters