Trump warns Beijing over Hong Kong move
US president threatens ‘very strong’ response over tightening control of beleaguered territory
DONALD TRUMP yesterday warned China that the US would respond “very strongly” if Beijing imposed tighter control over Hong Kong, as tensions rise between the two countries amid fallout from the pandemic.
China’s government announced that national security legislation for Hong Kong will be proposed at its annual “rubber stamp” parliamentary sessions, which opened yesterday, in the latest sign from Beijing plans to crack down on pro-democracy protests in the semi-autonomous territory. “If it happens, we’ll address that very strongly,” Mr Trump said as he took questions from the White House yesterday.
Mr Trump has stepped up his attacks on China over the pandemic in recent days, appearing to directly blame Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, for a campaign of “disinformation” that helped spread Covid-19 globally.
The US president wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night: “It all comes from the top. They could have easily stopped the plague, but they didn’t!”
His comments came as a study suggested that around 36,000 fewer Americans would have died from the pandemic if the US had imposed social distancing measures just one week earlier than it did in mid-march.
According to the estimates from disease modellers at Columbia University in New York, if the US had introduced lockdowns two weeks earlier, on March 1, as many as 54,000 lives could have been saved by May 3. To date, more than 93,000 Americans have died from the virus. Mr Trump branded the study a “political hit job” from a “liberal” institution yesterday.
He said: “I was so early, I was earlier than anybody thought. I put a ban on people coming in from China.” But in early March, Mr Trump was still reassuring the public that they could go about their daily life safely, writing on Twitter: “At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of coronavirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!” Judd its mission.” Mr Trump also lashed out earlier on Wednesday, saying: “It was the ‘incompetence of China’, and nothing else, that did this mass worldwide killing.”
The president has accused China of covering up the scale of the initial outbreak and failing to prevent its spread, signalling he intends to make an antichina approach a centrepiece of his November re-election bid.
China again threatened “countermeasures” in response as Beijing opened its parliamentary session yesterday after a delay of nearly three months due to the pandemic.
The country’s parliament said it will discuss a proposal for a national security law in Hong Kong.
Beijing has made clear it wants the legislation passed after the financial hub was hit by seven months of prodemocracy protests last year. The proposal was expected to strengthen “enforcement mechanisms” in Hong Kong, Zhang Yesui, the parliament’s spokesman, said.