Beijing on Thursday accused the United States of hypocrisy in response to accusations by President Joe Biden that China is \u201cxenophobic\u201d and \u201ccheating\u201d on trade. \u201cI would like to ask him: are you talking about China or the US itself?\u201d foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said when asked about the comments. In a speech on Wednesday to union members, Biden called for a hike in steel tariffs on China, accusing it of cheating as he courted blue-collar voters on an election campaign trip to the battleground state of Pennsylvania. \u201cThey\u2019re not competing, they\u2019re cheating. They\u2019re cheating and we\u2019ve seen the damage here in America,\u201d the 81-year-old Biden said to cheers at the headquarters of the United Steelworkers union in Pittsburgh. The Democrat said Chinese steel companies \u201cdon\u2019t need to worry about making a profit because the Chinese government is subsidising them so heavily\u201d. Biden said he had called for the US Trade Representative to triple the tariff rates for Chinese steel and aluminium if Beijing was confirmed to be using anti-competitive practices. \u201cThey\u2019re xenophobic,\u201d he added. \u201cThey\u2019ve got real problems. I\u2019m not looking for a fight with China, I\u2019m looking for competition \u2014 but fair competition.\u201d Beijing and Washington have clashed in recent years on flashpoint issues from technology and trade to human rights as well as over the self-ruled island of Taiwan and the disputed South China Sea. Relations have stabilised somewhat since Presidents Biden and Xi Jinping met in San Francisco in November for talks that both sides described as a qualified success. The two held a follow-up telephone call this month, where they clashed over US trade restrictions on technology and on Taiwan, which Beijing claims. But they also agreed that two high-level US officials would soon travel to China \u2014 US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited last week, with top diplomat Antony Blinken due in Beijing soon. The US also this week announced a probe into China\u2019s trade practices in the shipbuilding, maritime and logistics sectors. China\u2019s commerce ministry hit back, saying the probe was \u201cfull of false accusations, misinterpreting normal trade and investment activities as harming US national security and corporate interests, and blaming China for its own industrial problems\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Beijing on Thursday accused the United States of hypocrisy in response to accusations by President Joe Biden that China is \u201cxenophobic\u201d and \u201ccheating\u201d on trade….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":16316,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/16316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diplomacypakistan.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}