‘Those with bigger fists should not be allowed to call the shots’: China takes aim at Trump

China is using the geopolitical instability triggered by US President Donald Trump to cast itself as the world’s reliable partner, as America retreats from the international system and embarks on a tariff war.

In a tightly stage-managed press conference on the sidelines of China’s rubber-stamp legislature on Friday, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi projected China as an “anchor of stability” in a “changing and turbulent world”, one that would safeguard fairness and peace.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi addresses the media on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress in Beijing.Credit: AP

He said China was a beneficiary and custodian of the United Nations system, warning that the “law of the jungle” would take hold without it, while issuing an indirect swipe at the United States, which hit China with 20 per cent tariffs on all its exports this week.

“Those with stronger arms and bigger fists should not be allowed to call the shots,” Wang said.

His comments came as Trump gave Canada and Mexico a month-long tariff reprieve on certain imports while leaving duties imposed on Chinese goods in place.

Wang declined to respond directly to a question on whether Beijing would send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine, but he pledged China would play a “constructive role” to help resolve the conflict. He also played down the idea that recent talks between the US and Russia would have an impact on the alliance between Beijing and Moscow.

Hostesses fill up tea cups before the opening session of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Tuesday.Credit: AP

“The China-Russia friendship will not change,” he said. “It is a constant in a turbulent world, rather than a variable in geopolitical gains.”

With the Trump administration using its opening weeks in power to upend decades of US foreign policy – scrapping overseas aid, pulling out of international organisations, weakening alliances with allies and threatening to take control of territories such as Greenland and the Panama Canal – China has eyed an opportunity to sell its own alternative to the US-led global order.

China, too, however, has selectively applied norms of international law to its own actions, aggressively pursuing dominance in the South China Sea and rejecting UN findings that it had committed “serious human rights violations” against the Uyghur Muslim minorities in Xinjiang.

Wang’s comments build on China’s championing of a multipolar world, in which the US is not the dominant enforcer of global security. As part of this, China has stepped up its diplomatic courting of Global South countries in Asia and Africa, upon whose votes it relies in UN forums to reject resolutions denouncing its human rights record.

Australia, the US and its allies see China as the biggest challenge to regional security in the Indo-Pacific region.

Wang also reiterated that Beijing would continue to retaliate against US tariffs, setting the stage for an escalating trade feud between the world’s two largest economies.

“If one side exerts pressure, China will resolutely counter that,” Wang told journalists, denouncing the tariffs as arbitrary and something “no responsible major country should do”. He added that both countries still have “broad common interests and space for co-operation”.

China fired back at the US with its own package of retaliatory tariffs and trade curbs on Tuesday, but many experts believe China’s response, which targeted tariffs at meat and farm products rather than imposing sweeping duties, signals Beijing’s willingness to strike a trade deal with the US.

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