The Chinese leader indirectly fired on the United States and its foreign policy on Tuesday, and warned in a UN speech that the world will have to “not fall into the trap of a clash of civilizations,” comments that were reproduced minutes after delegates listened to the PRESIDENT of the United States. He insists that AMERICAN nations “account China” for how it treated the onset of coronavirus.
“Big countries act as big countries,” Xi Jinping said in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly, a speech delivered remotely and recorded in advance because the pandemic prevented leaders from meeting as they have for decades. in China before this year and spread around the world, killing nearly a million people.
Xi, President of China and head of its Communist Party, presented the fight against the virus as a vital exercise in foreign cooperation, an opportunity to “unite and be able to face even more global challenges. “
“COVID-19 reminds us that economic globalization is an undeniable truth and an ancient trend,” Xi said. “Burying your head in the sand like an ostrich in the face of economic globalization or looking to fight it with Don Quixote’s spear goes against the current of history. Let me be clear: the global will never return to isolation. “
Such comments, while not appointing U. S. President Donald Trump, are highly critical of him and his “America First” philosophy, which goes against China’s public position on how international relations deserve to be managed. Affairs.
Earlier in the day, Trump used his own UN speech to strongly condemn Xi’s administration for what the US president calls “the Chinese virus,” a term he used Tuesday and called the virus an “invisible enemy. “Many consider the same term “Chinese virus” to be racist.
Although Trump praised Xi at the beginning of his tenure, two key problems, a tariff dispute, and the emergence of the coronavirus, helped push his administration to take a more difficult stance toward the Chinese government.
“The United Nations will have to hold China accountable for its actions,” Trump said in his own speech.
China has a long-standing practice of reflexively rejecting any complaints about its policies. Tuesday without exception. While Xi, being pre-recorded and absent, simply cannot refute what Trump said, his ambassador to the UN was present at the General Assembly Hall and responded directly through Xi’s video.
“Right now, the world wants more solidarity and cooperation, not confrontation,” Zhang Jun said. “We want to build mutual acceptance as true and accept as true with, not the spread of the political virus. China resolutely rejects the baseless. ” accusation opposed to China.
Xi spoke at a historic time when China strives to manage its astonishing, and incredibly complex, military, economic and political rise as it faces competitive containment methods of the existing global superpower, the United States, and its friends and allies.
“Xi Jinping has his cadres cut out for him in the General Assembly,” said Mike Mazza, a Chinese analyst at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, who highlighted tensions with Europe over industry and investment, climate and human rights, as well as The Trump administration’s most coherent confrontation towards China.
Xi was unable to capitalize on the negative emotions between many European leaders and Trump, while a imaginable détente with Japan stopped. Relations with Australia have ignored accusations of espionage and political manipulation and called for an investigation into the Chinese origins of the coronavirus outbreak, Mazza said. .
These are, “in general, of his own creation,” Mazza said of China.
As competitive as Beijing might seem to its neighbors when it uses its expanding and hard military economy to forge what it sees as its herbal sphere of influence in Asia, it is a fragile moment in what is perceived as China’s inevitable rise as a superpower. .
Beijing has been criticized for the persistent consequences of the coronavirus pandemic, which emerged in Wuhan Province late last year. Some say Beijing first tried to control the epidemic before taking credit for its reaction for public relations purposes.
China’s severe restrictions on civil rights in Hong Kong following the imposition of a radical national security law in the semi-autonomous city and widespread accusations of mass arrests and cultural genocide against Muslims in the Xinjiang region are causing outrage. in the face of China’s growing tension and the threats of the military opposed to Taiwan, the autonomous island democracy that Beijing claims as its own territory.
Meanwhile, China’s push to reclaim nearly the entire South China Sea has sparked friction with neighboring Beijing and the United States to the south, while a decades-long border dispute with India erupted this year into fatal fights between rival troops and gunfire. for the first time. time in decades.
All of this has undermined the arguments in favor of commitment to China, as the industrial war between Beijing, the world’s second-largest economy, and Washington, the largest, continues to boil.
“Xi will locate a very contrasting foreign environment when it resorts to the UNAGG. Most democracies that in the past have greatly supported China’s modernization and progress are uncomfortable with the way Xi is leading China’s growth,” said Steve Tsang, director of the Institute of China. at the London School of Oriental and African Studies.
The United States and China are now “locked up in a collision course that could potentially lead to a damaging military conflict,” said Cheng Li, analyst at Brookings Institution China. An immediate purpose of Xi will be to “show how China has taken the lead in asking for multilateralism and addressing global Array considerations . . . while the United States has left a big gap in global leadership. “
Xi, in doing so with his speech, insisted that China under his rule veered into the imperialism that its communist government has long condemned.
“We will never seek hegemony or sphere of influence,” he said. “We do not aim to wage an incrutinent war or a hot war with any country. “
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Foster Klug, AP’s Chief Information Director for Korea, Japan, Australia and the South Pacific, has covered Asia at annual UNGPA meetings since 2005. Correspondent of Ted Anthony AP and editor in Beijing from 2001 to 2004 and director of Asia-Pacific News from 2014 to 2018. .