US uses tensions to prop anti-China pacts: Beijing envoy
China’s envoy for the Korean peninsula has blamed the US for manipulating Korean tensions to prop up an anti-Beijing alliance in the region, insisting the scheme remains “part of their Indo-Pacific strategy.”
“We are concerned about the US intention to use Korean peninsula issues as a tool for containing China,” said Beijing’s Special Representative Liu Xiaoming following his tour of European capitals.
“It’s part of their Indo-Pacific strategy... to gang up allies, to strengthen their alliance with (South Korea) and Japan,” he further emphasized.
After holding talks in capitals -- including Berlin, Brussels, and Paris -- Liu underlined that European leaders should “persuade Americans to address the security concerns” of North Korea, pointing out that Pyongyang’s gestures during the Trump administration had not been reciprocated in kind by Washington.
“The message sent to the DPRK is still pressure, sanctions, confrontation, so that made dialogue impossible,” the Chinese envoy further emphasized, challenging the “seriousness” of Washington’s purported commitment to denuclearization.
DPRK stands for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and is the official name of North Korea.
Liu’s call came days after French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated his ambition of “strategic independence” setting Europe apart from both the US and China as he returned from a visit to Beijing.
Macron’s remarks sparked a fierce reaction in other European capitals and in Washington, following a year in which the continent’s dependence on the US for its defense has been laid to bare in the course of the Ukraine conflict.
“We appreciate the independent strategy by some of the European countries,” Liu underlined, noting: “I think it serves the interests of Europe.”
With China’s ambassador already back in Pyongyang after years of closed borders due to Covid-19, those European nations who previously had missions there “hope they can reopen the embassies and start exchanges with the DPRK,” he added.
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