China has warned the Asian democracies of Australia, India, and Japan that the US will "dump" them like "trash", the way it abandoned its allies in Afghanistan, a reference to the widely-criticised troop withdrawal from the region.
The warning was sounded in the state-backed Global Times, as the heads of the four-nation "Quad" grouping convened in Washington, DC, for the first-ever in-person summit on 24 September. The White House summit was hosted by US President Joe Biden and was attended by India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Japanese PM Yoshihide Suga, and Australian counterpart Scott Morrison.
"If Japan, India, and Australia go too far in following the US strategy of containing China, they will become cannon fodder as China will resolutely safeguard its interests", the Global Times quoted analysts as saying.
The column quoted Fudan University Professor Lin Minwang as saying that even after suffering a "great loss" to its interests in Afghanistan in the wake of the takeover of the country by the Taliban*, India had "swallowed the bitter pill" without complaining to the US.
In an editorial published on the eve of the Quad summit, the Global Times also warned the Asian democracies that they could incur significant retaliation from Beijing if they followed the US "too far" in confronting Beijing,
The Global Times cautioned that Washington would adopt an "Asian versus Asian" strategy and pit certain countries in the region against others while itself standing down from "directly engaging" in regional affairs.
The newspaper claimed that the true purpose of the Quad was to "encircle" China, even as it wondered why exactly the US would want to encircle the world's second-biggest economy.
"Every element [of the Quad] contains a great deal of imagination. As a result, the agenda of the Quad is rather distorted and full of paranoid extensions, like argots which are ambiguous but can be understood by conjecture", the editorial said.
The Chinese media further described the Quad as being comprised of "four wards with four different diseases".
23 October 2020, 13:43 GMT
The Global Times additionally published two sarcastic cartoons in the lead-up to the White House summit, with one of them showing an "unhinged kangaroo", an elephant, and a suited-man being led in a bus driven by "Uncle Sam".
In the other cartoon, an American eagle can be seen thinking about a plan to surround China with the help of the said Asian nations, even as it argued that the grouping was "incapable" of inflicting any harm on Beijing.
The scathing commentaries on the Quad and the warnings to the Asian nations in the state-backed media are in line with official statements by the Chinese government, with Foreign Minister Wang Yi in the past labelling the Quad as an "Asian NATO" that could create instability in the region.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said hours before the Quad summit that any "closed" and "exclusive clique" targeting other countries was "doomed to fail".
"Relevant countries should view China's development in a correct light and do more to promote solidarity and cooperation among countries in the region", Zhao said.
*The Taliban is a terrorist group banned in Russia and many other countries.