Beijing will defend its interests: Envoy

Bloomberg

China’s ambassador to the US said Beijing has no choice but to respond to what he described as a trade war started by the US.
“We never wanted a trade war, but if somebody started a trade war against us, we have to respond and defend our own interests,” Ambassador Cui Tiankai said on “Fox News Sunday” in a rare US television appearance. His comments come amid high political and economic tensions between the world’s two largest economies, with officials from both nations having traded ever-harsher barbs in recent weeks. Cui also dismissed as “groundless” a suggestion by Vice President Mike Pence that China has orchestrated an effort to meddle in US domestic affairs.
Pence ramped up the rhetoric in a speech on October 4, saying Beijing has created a “a whole-of-government approach” to sway American public opinion, including spies, tariffs, coercive measures and a propaganda campaign. His comments were some of the most critical about China by a high-ranking US official in recent memory. The tough words followed months of increases tit-for-tat tariffs imposed by Washington and Beijing that have ballooned to cover hundreds of billions of dollars in bilateral trade.

Escalating Row
In a recent interview with National Public Radio, Cui said the US has “not sufficiently” dealt in good faith with the Chinese on trade matters, saying “the US position keeps changing all the time so we don’t know exactly what the US would want as priorities.”
The escalating trade row was seen as a contributing factor to last week’s global market rout that sent the S&P 500 and other major US indexes to their worst performances in months.
Larry Kudlow, the White House economic director, said on the same show that President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will “probably meet” at the G-20 summit in Buenos Aires in late November. “There’s plans and discussions and agendas” being discussed, he said. Cui said he was present at two previous meetings of Xi and Trump, and that
top-level communication “played a key role, an irreplaceable role, in guiding the relationship forward.”