China Blasts US, Japan and South Korea for ‘Smearing’ Beijing

Bloomberg News
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(Bloomberg) -- China called President Joe Biden’s trilateral summit with the leaders of South Korea and Japan a “deliberate attempt to sow discord” between the world’s second-largest economy and two of its Asian neighbors.

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Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the leaders who met Friday at the Camp David presidential retreat had “smeared and attacked China” on a range of issues, including Taiwan — the self-ruled island Beijing calls its own.

“Currently we see two trajectories in the Asia Pacific,” Wang said at a regular press briefing in Beijing on Monday. “One features efforts for greater solidarity, cooperation and economic integration,” he added. “The other features attempts to start division and confrontation and revive the Cold War mentality.”

During last week’s landmark meeting, Biden discussed with South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida measures to de-risk global supply chains from their exposure to China. The three men agreed the trilateral summit would become an annual event.

They also pledged to share real-time data on North Korea’s missile launches and set up a new hotline to swiftly share intelligence and launch multi-domain military exercises. China, by contrast, has currently frozen high-level, in-person military dialogue with the US.

Read more: {Five Takeaways From the US, Japan and South Korea Summit}

The missile agreement was always likely to upset Beijing. China enforced painful economic measures against South Korea to try to stop it from deploying a US missile defense system known as Thaad, aimed at protecting the country from a North Korean attack.

Beijing’s subsequent conditions for mending those ties included having Seoul agree not to join any US-led regional missile defense system or a trilateral alliance with the US and Japan.

Wang said on Monday that a regional missile agreement would “only increase the risk of confrontation and harm the strategic security interests of other countries,” and urged South Korea to address this issue “properly.”

The leaders of Japan, Korea and the US also reaffirmed the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and raised concerns about what they called the “dangerous and aggressive behavior supporting unlawful maritime claims that we have recently witnessed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the South China Sea.”

China’s stated position is that the question of Taiwan is a domestic issue, Wang said. The country earlier this year criticized Yoon when he said that the dispute between Beijing and Taiwan was now a global issue.

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