Beijing criticises Pentagon report calling China the leading security threat to the US
- US defence strategy says China poses ‘the most comprehensive and serious challenge to US national security’
- China’s defence ministry retorts that US vilifies normal military growth and that China adheres to peaceful development and safeguarding the international system
Beijing has protested the Pentagon’s national strategy report that “smears” China as the primary security threat to the US, the Chinese defence ministry said on Friday.
“The countries that stubbornly prioritise their own interests above anyone else and gang up on an ‘integrated deterrence’ in the Asia Pacific are the real ‘pacing challenge’ to the international system and the region,” ministry spokesman Tan Kefei said, using phrases from the report.
Tan was responding to the 2022 National Defence Strategy (NDS) released by the Pentagon last week, which declared China a “pacing challenge” to focus on in collaboration with its allies and partners.
“The most comprehensive and serious challenge to US national security,” the report stated, was China’s “coercive and increasingly aggressive endeavour to refashion the Indo-Pacific region and the international system to suit its interests and authoritarian preferences”.
China, it continued, “seeks to undermine US alliances and security partnerships in the Indo-Pacific region, and leverage its growing capabilities, including its economic influence and the PLA’s growing strength and military footprint, to coerce its neighbours and threaten their interests”.
“The PRC’s increasingly provocative rhetoric and coercive activity towards Taiwan are destabilising, risk miscalculation and threaten the peace and stability of the Taiwan Strait,” it said, adding that “this is part of a broader pattern of destabilising and coercive PRC behaviour” in the region.