US President Donald Trump has said that China should face unspecified consequences if it was "knowingly responsible" for the coronavirus pandemic. “I
US President Donald Trump has said that China should face unspecified consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for the coronavirus pandemic.
“If it was a mistake, a mistake is a mistake. But if they were knowingly responsible, yeah, I mean, then sure there should be consequences.”
Trump however did not elaborate on what actions the United States might take. He and his senior aides have sharply criticised China for a lack of transparency after the coronavirus broke out in its Wuhan province. Last week, he suspended aid to the World Health Organisation accusing it of being “China-centric”.
Washington and Beijing, the world’s two biggest economies, have publicly sparred over the virus repeatedly.
Trump initially praised China’s response to the outbreak, but he and other senior officials have also referred to it as the “Chinese virus” and in recent days have ratcheted up their rhetoric. They have also angrily rejected earlier attempts by some Chinese officials to blame the origin of the virus on the US military.
Trump’s domestic critics say that while China performed badly at the outset and must still come clean on what happened, he is now seeking to use Beijing to help deflect from the shortcomings of his own response and take advantage of growing anti-China sentiment among some voters for his 2020 re-election bid.
At the same time, however, White House officials are mindful of the potential backlash if tensions get too heated. The US is heavily reliant on China for personal protection equipment desperately needed by American medical workers, and Trump also wants to keep a hard-won trade deal on track.
He said the US-China relationship was good “until they did this”, citing a recent first-phase agricultural deal aimed at quelling a trade war between the two countries. “But then all of a sudden you hear about this,” he said.
He said the Chinese were “embarrassed” and the question now was whether what happened with the coronavirus was “a mistake that got out of control, or was it done deliberately?” “There’s a big difference between those two,” he said.
