Beijing: China has ordered the United States to close its consulate in the southwestern city of Chengdu, retaliating against Washington’s move earlier this week to shut down the Chinese consulate in Houston.
The Chinese foreign ministry said on Friday that the Chengdu mission’s closure was a “legitimate and necessary response to the unreasonable measures by the United States”.
“The current situation in China-US relations is not what China desires to see,” it said in a statement, adding that “the US is responsible for all this”.
The tit-for-tat moves come amid a dramatic escalation in tensions between the world’s two biggest economies.
Ties have deteriorated over a number of issues, ranging from the new coronavirus pandemic to Beijing’s trade and business practices, its territorial claims in the South China Sea and its clampdown in Hong Kong and the far western region of Xinjiang.
On Tuesday, the frictions ratcheted up when Washington gave Beijing 72 hours to close its mission in the Texas city of Houston alleging the theft of intellectual property and espionage – a claim the Chinese side called “malicious slander”.
And hours before China’s response to the consulate closure, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo took fresh aim at Beijing, saying Washington and its allies must use “more creative and assertive ways” to press the Chinese Communist Party to change its ways.
Speaking at the Nixon Library in US President Richard Nixon’s birthplace in Yorba Linda, California, Pompeo said on Thursday that the former US leader’s worry about what he had done by opening the world to China’s Communist Party in the 1970s had been prophetic.
