China’s mission to the European Union urged NATO on Tuesday to stop exaggerating the ‘China threat theory’ after the group’s leaders warned that the country presented ‘systemic challenges’,
Reuters reports.
NATO leaders took a forceful stance towards Beijing in a communique at United States President Joe Biden’s first summit with the alliance.
“China's stated ambitions and assertive behavior present systemic challenges to the rules-based international order and to areas relevant to alliance security,” NATO leaders had said.
The new U.S. president has urged his fellow NATO leaders to stand up to China's authoritarianism and growing military might, a change of focus for an alliance created to defend Europe from the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
The NATO statement ‘slandered’ China's peaceful development, misjudged the international situation, and indicated a ‘Cold War mentality’, China said in a response posted on the mission’s website.
China is always committed to peaceful development, it added.
“We will not pose a ‘systemic challenge’ to anyone, but if anyone wants to pose a ‘systemic challenge’ to us, we will not remain indifferent.”
In Beijing, a spokesman for the foreign ministry, Zhao Lijian, said the United States and Europe had ‘different interests’, and that some European countries “will not tie themselves to the anti-China war chariot of the United States.”
