Virus pushing US ties to the brink of ‘Cold War’: China

BEIJING: China said Sunday that relations with the United States were “on the brink of a new Cold War”, fuelled in part by tensions over the coronavirus pandemic that has killed nearly 350,000 people worldwide and pitched the global economy into a massive downturn. Fresh tensions between Beijing and Washington emerged as virus restrictions muted celebrations by Muslims around the world of the end of Ramadan, Islam’s holy fasting month. More European nations meanwhile moved to ease their lockdowns.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson was on Sunday forced to defend his top aide Dominic Cummings, accused of having breached the government’s own lockdown rules.

Globally more than 5.3 million people have been infected by the virus, which most scientists believe jumped from animals to humans — possibly at a market in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, where the pandemic emerged in December.

US President Donald Trump has accused Beijing of a lack of transparency over the outbreak, and is pushing the theory that it may have leaked from a top-security Chinese laboratory.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Sunday that Washington had been infected by a “political virus” to continually attack China, but that Beijing would nevertheless be open to an international effort to find the coronavirus source.

“It has come to our attention that some political forces in the US are taking China-US relations hostage and pushing our two countries to the brink of a new Cold War,” Wang said. He blasted what he called efforts by US politicians to “fabricate rumours” about the virus’s origin and “stigmatise China”.

While European nations initially among the hardest hit have started to ease lockdowns in a bid to salvage economies and lifestyles, other countries such as Brazil, where deaths have surged, are emerging as new centres of the pandemic.