BEIJING (NYTIMES) – After US President Donald Trump pilloried China in 48 tweeted words, accusing it of failing to tame its neighbour and longtime ally North Korea, Beijing issued its own rebuke to Mr Trump – in a cutting editorial of 1,000 Chinese characters from Xinhua, the official news agency..
BEIJING (NYTIMES) – After US President Donald Trump pilloried China in 48 tweeted words, accusing it of failing to tame its neighbour and longtime ally North Korea, Beijing issued its own rebuke to Mr Trump – in a cutting editorial of 1,000 Chinese characters from Xinhua, the official news agency.
“Trump is quite a personality, and he likes to tweet, ” said the Xinhua response issued late on Monday (July 31) and widely displayed on Chinese news websites. “But emotional venting cannot become a guiding policy for solving the nuclear issue on the peninsula, ” it said, referring to the divided Korean Peninsula.
The United States, it added, “must not continue spurning responsibility” for the volatile standoff with North Korea, “and even less should it stab China in the back”.
The unusually personal nature of the editorial, together with comments delivered earlier that day by China’s ambassador to the United Nations in New York, show that North Korea is becoming the main dispute threatening to tear at Mr Trump’s initially friendly relationship with his Chinese counterpart, Mr Xi Jinping.
“I am very disappointed in China, ” Mr Trump declared on Twitter on Sunday, after North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) in defiance of UN sanctions.
Despite China’s big trade surplus with the US, he continued in a second tweet, saying, ‘they do NOTHING for us with North Korea, just talk”.
China’s rebuke to Mr Trump did not use exclamation marks. But the Xinhua editorial broke with Beijing’s usual public reticence when Mr Trump has taken China to task over trade imbalances, territorial disputes in the South China Sea, Taiwan and other sources of tension.
“Taking out this outrage on China is clearly finding the wrong target, ” it said, warning such broadsides could be dangerous.
