Staff members work at the NATO Headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on March 24, 2022. A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman on Thursday urged the NATO chief to stop spreading smearing remarks targeting China, and abandon the obsession with drawing ideologies.
The statement was made by Spokesperson Wang Wenbin on a daily news briefing after responding to a question about NATO Secretary General's irresponsible remarks on China recently.
Wang said that the NATO secretary general has been making groundless accusations and smearing China for some time. He has always made irresponsible remarks about China's policies and hyped up the so-called China threat theory. China strongly opposes and condemns these kinds of actions.
It is a double standard for NATO to call for its members to increase their military spending at or above 2 percent of GDP while criticizing China's normal national defense and military modernization, Wang said.
For a long time, Wang said that China is committed to the path of peaceful development and that China's defense expenditure has been kept at around 1.3 percent for a long time, much less than the world average.
China does not use force to threaten other countries, engages in military alliances, exports ideology to other countries, puts its hands into other countries' homes, initiates trade wars or arbitrarily suppresses other countries' businesses, unlike some NATO countries. How does China threaten NATO? He said something.
NATO has continued to enter the Asia-Pacific region in recent years, even though it has repeatedly claimed that its positioning as a regional alliance remains the same. Some NATO members have been sending planes and warships to China's neighbouring waters for military exercises, with an aim to provoke tensions and contradictions, Wang said.
He said NATO has been transgressing regions and fields and clamoring for a new Cold War of Blocks confrontation. There is a reason for high vigilance and strong opposition from the international community.
READ MORE: Uncovering secrets of NATO: A relict from Cold War days.
We urge the NATO secretary general to stop spreading smearing remarks targeting China and abandoning the obsession with drawing ideological lines, Wang said.
He said that it should stop trying to destabilize Asia and the whole world.