Days after foreign ministers of the Quad combine met in New Delhi and reviewed the situation in the Indo-Pacific, China’s Foreign Minister Qin Gang on Tuesday slammed the US and said its strategy for the region aimed to “encircle” China with a regional vision of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation(NATO)by forming “exclusive blocs.” The minister also claimed this strategy was bound to fail.
Incidentally, he had attended the G-20 Foreign Ministers’ conclave in New Delhi last week. The Foreign Ministers of Quad grouping including the US, India, Japan and Australia met on the sidelines of the conclave on Thursday last.
Since its formation, China has been criticising the US Indo-Pacific strategy as well as the Quad grouping consisting of the US, India, Japan and Australia besides AUKUS comprising of Australia, the UK and the US alliance, saying that they were aimed at containing its rise. “The US Indo-Pacific strategy while purportedly upholding freedom and openness to maintain security and prosperity in the region is an attempt to gang up to form exclusive blocs to provoke a confrontation by plotting an Asia Pacific version of NATO and to undermine regional integration through decoupling and supply chains”, Qin said.
NATO is a leading intergovernmental military grouping of 30 member nations that was established in the aftermath of World War II. The grouping functions under the framework of collective security. The headquarters of NATO is in Brussels. “No Cold War should be reignited and no Ukraine-style crisis should be repeated in Asia”, he said addressing his first annual press conference on sidelines of China's Parliament. “The US claims to shape the strategic environment China operates actually reveals the purpose of its Indo-Pacific strategy that is to encircle China”, he said.
“Such an attempt will only disrupt the ASEAN-centred open inclusive regional cooperation architecture and undermine the overall and long-term interests of the regional countries. It is bound to fail,” Qin, who in last December succeeded Wang Yi, said in answering a question on the US Indo-Pacific strategy. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) is an international organisation that has 10 member countries in Southeast Asia: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam.
The US, India and several other world powers have been talking about the need to ensure a free, open and thriving Indo-Pacific in the backdrop of China's rising military manoeuvring in the resource-rich region.
China claims nearly all of the disputed South China Sea, though Taiwan, the Philippines, Brunei, Malaysia and Vietnam all claim parts of it. Beijing has built artificial islands and military installations in the South China Sea. China also has territorial disputes with Japan in the East China Sea. In his nearly two-hour-long press conference in which Qin took questions on China's ties with Russia, the US, the European Union(EU), and Japan but did not take any questions on India in his highly-choreographed press conference.