Pompeo's claim of 'China threat' dismissed as lies

Just a week ahead of America’s presidential election, senior US officials stepped up their anti-China message — widely pushed by the Trump administration — during a visit to India, a move that quickly drew opposition from Beijing.

The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that the US and India would “confront threats to their freedom and sovereignty” during his visit to India for the India-US 2+2 Ministerial Dialogue.

Chinese foreign ministry refutes Pompeo’s so-called “China threat” claim as one of Pompeo’s cliched anti-China lies.

By doing this, the US is indeed trying to get China back to the state of poverty and backwardness, the Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Wednesday as he responded to a series of questions regarding Pompeo’s visit in the Indo-Pacific region.

China is not a threat, but an opportunity, Wang said, adding that nothing can stop the global trend of peaceful development and win-win cooperation.

He also urged the US not to force Sri Lanka to pick sides as Pompeo arrived in the country for the second stop of his visit.

The Chinese Embassy in India on Tuesday urged the United States to “respect facts and truth, abandon the Cold War and the zero-sum mentality, stop hyping up the so-called ‘China threat,’ and stop the wrong actions that undermine regional peace and stability.”

The embassy said in a statement that Pompeo and other senior officials repeated lies, attacked and made allegations against China, violated the norms of international relations and basic principles of diplomacy, instigated China’s relations with other countries in the region, which once again exposed their ideological bias.

“The Chinese side expresses its firm opposition to it,” the statement said.

In a meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper called for deepening ties between the two countries. That, he said, is particularly important “in light of increasing aggression and destabilizing actions by China.”

“The Indo-Pacific strategy lost its economic backbone after the US withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement,” commented Sun Chenghao, an assistant research fellow at the Institute of American Studies at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations.

The Chinese Embassy noted that the so-called “Indo-Pacific strategy” proposed by the United States is to stir up confrontation among different groups and blocs and to stoke geopolitical competition, in a bid to maintain the dominance of the United States, organize closed and exclusive ideological cliques.

China has been advocating that the development of bilateral relations between countries should be conducive to regional peace, stability and development, and not infringe upon the legitimate rights and interests of a third party, the statement said.

On the boundary question, the embassy said it was a bilateral matter between China and India.

“China and India have the wisdom and ability to handle their differences properly. There’s no space for a third party to intervene,” it added.