China’s state-run propaganda newspaper Global Times complained Friday that President Donald Trump’s nomination acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC) mentioned China over ten times and derided his rival Joe Biden’s ties to the communist regime.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry also weighed in the speech, delivered Thursday night in front of the White House, asking candidates “not to make an issue out of China in its election.”
Trump’s policies towards China — meant to curb increased economic dependence on the country and combat widespread cyber-crime, intellectual property theft, and espionage by dictator Xi Jinping’s state — are a primary selling point of his re-election campaign. During his speech Thursday, Trump vowed to “also provide tax credits to bring jobs out of China back to America, and we will impose tariffs on any company that leaves America to produce jobs overseas.”
“We’ll make sure our companies and jobs stay in our country, as I’ve already been doing. Joe Biden’s agenda is Made in China. My agenda is Made in the USA,” Trump said.
The Global Times accused him of “shifting blame” away from himself towards China on several issues, including the economy and the Chinese coronavirus pandemic, made possible by the Communist Party’s woeful handling of the initial outbreak of the newly discovered pathogen in central Wuhan city. One study found the Communist Party could have prevented up to 95 percent of cases of the virus within its borders if it had not actively suppressed public health information on curtailing the spread of disease.
“Touting a twisted reality with rhetoric about his personal achievements, President Donald Trump delivered his GOP nomination speech to run for a second term on Thursday local time,” the Global Times claimed. “Trump mentioned China more than 10 times, including calling COVID-19 [the Chinese coronavirus] the ‘China virus,’ touting his efforts to contain China and claiming China wants Biden to win. In comparison, Biden only mentioned China once in his speech last week.”
The Chinese state propaganda outlet interpreted this as favorable to Biden. It then relayed that its “experts” — Communist Party approved talking heads — had dismissed Trump’s references to his policy on China as “a timeworn tactic that Trump also used four years ago in his first election campaign; in fact, antagonizing China is his way of creating an enemy in an attempt to appease his base.”
The Times concluded by accusing the United States under Trump of “moving backwards on human rights.”
In a more official capacity, China’s Foreign Ministry also responded to Trump’s speech on Friday. Zhao Lijian, the spokesman responsible for the conspiracy theory that the Chinese coronavirus originated in a U.S. Army laboratory, urged both Trump and Biden “not to make an issue out of China in its election.”
“Regarding what he said about China, I’d like to reiterate China’s consistent and clear policy towards the U.S. We believe both stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation,” Zhao claimed. “We urge the U.S. to look at China and bilateral relations in an objective and rational light, work with us towards the same goal, manage differences, promote cooperation and bring China-US relations back onto the right track of coordination, cooperation and stability.”
Zhao also called any criticism of the negative effects of globalism on local communities “perverse.”
He previously weighed in on the RNC on Thursday, disparaging a speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
“Every time Pompeo opens his mouth, the international community sees with greater clarity who is peddling lies, disinformation and Cold-War mentality and who is upholding world peace, global development and international order,” Zhao told reporters. “Every time Pompeo opens his mouth, the Chinese people support the Communist Party of China more and love the motherland more.”
Chinese state media has spent much of the week disparaging the programming at the RNC. On Thursday, the Global Times called the United States in its entirety “paranoid” and contended that Trump’s policies were necessary to scam “groups with very poor education, especially whites without a university degree.”
“To have a clear picture of the real distribution of economic and trade benefits between China and the US requires a sharper set of academic skills than they have,” the Times claimed.
In another article on Thursday, the outlet cited its “experts” once again to decry that Trump had turned the Republican Party into a “street gang.” Its evidence of this was the appearance of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng — a blind self-taught lawyer who fought against forced abortions and other abuses of women in his rural village — at the RNC.
“The [Republican] party could not find any more decent people to give a speech, nor could it find any new topic. Chen has been wandering in the US for almost 10 years since he arrived in the country in 2012,” an “expert” identified as Fudan University professor Shen Yi said.
The Global Times also accused the RNC of “xenophobia,” failing to mention that Trump presided over a live naturalization ceremony to welcome five new Americans to the country.
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