China tells U.S. to stop pushing toward ‘cold war’
The United States should abandon its “wishful thinking about changing China” and stop pushing the two countries “to the brink of a new Cold War,” Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Sunday amid an increasingly fractious relationship.
As tensions between the world’s two largest economies mounting by the day, Wang used the opportunity of a news conference during the annual National People’s Congress to send a direct message to Washington.
“China has no intention to change, still less replace the United States,” Wang said Sunday before a selected group of journalists. “It’s time for the United States to give up its wishful thinking of changing China and stopping 1.4 billion people in their historic march toward modernization.”
In a nod toward President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who have repeatedly suggested that the ruling Chinese Communist Party is a threat to the world, Wang said that American politicians “are taking China-U.S. relations hostage and pushing our two countries to the brink of a new Cold War.”
This year, the conflict has taken on a new dimension, with the emergence of a novel coronavirus in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Reeling from more than 100,000 deaths in the United States, the Trump administration is trying to heap the blame for the pandemic entirely on China’s ruling Communist Party.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for Wang has suggested that American soldiers planted the virus in Wuhan during military games that were held in the city in October.
Wang focused only on the American theories Sunday, saying that some American politicians were trying to “stigmatize China.”
The Global Times, a newspaper affiliated with the Communist Party, reported Sunday that China was “considering punitive countermeasures” against some American politicians leading the efforts to hold it accountable for the virus.
These included Eric Schmitt, the Missouri attorney general who filed a lawsuit against China seeking compensation for the coronavirus pandemic, and congressmen including Senators Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton, the paper reported, citing anonymous “sources close to the matter.”