(Beijing) China on Thursday denounced NATO’s “completely futile” efforts to “dirty” it, after the publication the day before by the military alliance of a document presenting Beijing as a threat to its interests.
Posted at 6:55 a.m.
“This so-called NATO ‘strategic concept’ document ignores reality and presents the facts upside down,” said Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.
“He wrongly persists in portraying China as a systemic challenge and smearing Chinese foreign policy,” he said at a regular press conference, stressing Beijing’s “firm opposition”.
NATO ruled on Wednesday that Beijing represented a “challenge” for the “interests” and “security” of the countries of the Alliance, in its new roadmap adopted at its summit in Madrid.
“China’s declared ambitions and its coercive policies challenge our interests, our security and our values”, writes NATO in this document called “strategic concept” and which had not been revised since 2010.
This is the first time that this document has mentioned China, which traditionally did not come under the mission of the Atlantic Alliance.
NATO denounces in particular “the deep strategic partnership” between Beijing and Moscow “and their mutual attempts to undermine the rules-based international order”.
“It is completely futile to highlight a so-called Chinese threat,” Zhao Lijian said Thursday.
“China is not at all the systemic challenge that NATO imagines. By comparison, it is NATO that is the real systemic challenge to global peace and stability,” the Chinese spokesperson replied.
The Atlantic Alliance is regularly denounced by China as a hostile military group serving American interests and responsible for the current war in Ukraine.
“NATO claims to be a regional organization and defensive in nature. In fact, it keeps expanding beyond its regional scope and jurisdiction, starting wars and killing innocent civilians,” Zhao Lijian said.
“NATO’s hands are covered with the blood of the peoples of the world”, he stressed, referring in particular to the Alliance’s interventions in Afghanistan, Libya or the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Serbia. in 1999.
This last event, which caused the death of three Chinese journalists, permanently tarnished the reputation of NATO in the Asian country.