Trump Presidency: PE Deepens US-China Raw on Twitter

Local Editor

Donald Trump launched an attack against China, accusing Beijing of currency manipulation and flexing its military might in the South China Sea.

The tweets deepened a brewing diplomatic row that began on Friday when the US president-elect broke decades of US policy and spoke on the telephone with President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan.

He rejected the notion that he should have cleared the call with Beijing on Sunday night.

Earlier on Sunday Chinese state media had portrayed Trump as a novice at world affairs whose call to the Taiwanese president was a blunder rather than an intentional reorientation of US policy in Asia.

China Daily, a state-run newspaper, said the president-elect's "inexperience" led him to accept the call from Tsai Ing-wen, but warned that any further challenges to established norms in the US-China relationship would meet with a sterner response.

"If Trump wants to overstep the One China principle, he will destroy Sino-US ties," the newspaper wrote.

Members of Trump's inner circle defended the call, the first conversation between US and Taiwanese leaders since 1979, though they were split over whether it was a simple matter of politeness or an intentional provocation.

Mike Pence, the vice-president elect, said Trump had simply taken a "courtesy call" from Tsai, as he had done with more than 50 other world leaders.

"We'll deal with policy after January the 20th," he told ABC News, referring to the date of Trump's inauguration. "This was a courtesy call."

Reince Priebus, the incoming White House chief of staff, said Trump had known "exactly what was happening" in terms of the call's significance, but that the president-elect was not signaling a major policy shift toward China.

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the house and a Trump confidante, meanwhile told Fox News the call was meant to show "Beijing does not dictate who an American president speaks to."

Source: News Agencies, Edited by website team