China rejects Japan’s accusation of using pandemic to advance interests

China has dismissed an accusation by Japan that it is using the COVID-19 pandemic to advance its interests, including territorial claims in the East and South China Seas.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Tuesday that Japan’s annual defense white paper, which was released earlier in the day and which made the accusation against Beijing, was full of misinformation.

“Japan’s defense white paper is full of biases and false information,” Zhao said at a regular press conference. “It is trying to do all it can to hype up the so-called China threat.”

In the white paper, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government alleged that Beijing was “taking advantage” of its coronavirus-related assistance to other countries — including the dispatching of medical professionals and provision of face masks — to advance its interests.

It said China appeared to be accountable for “propaganda” and “disinformation” amid “social uncertainties and confusion” caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Elsewhere in the document, Japan said China was “relentlessly” attempting to undermine Japan’s claims on disputed islands in the East China Sea.

Beijing is locked in a long-running territorial dispute with Tokyo over an uninhabited yet strategically important island group known as Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China.

Ties between the two East Asian heavyweights deteriorated after Japan nationalized part of the resource-rich islands in 2012.

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Japan’s white paper said China was “continuing to attempt to alter the status quo in the East China Sea and the South China Sea.”

Japan has no claims in the South China Sea but expresses worries about Beijing’s territorial claims in the sea, where five trillion dollars in trade passes every year, much of it to and from Japanese ports.

Beijing claims sovereignty over almost all of the South and East China Seas. Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan have competing claims.

The South China Sea is also believed to sit atop vast oil and gas reserves.

Japan also alleged in the annual paper that Beijing was asserting territorial claims in the South China Sea by establishing administrative districts around disputed islands there.

The alleged move, Japan said, has forced countries distracted by the pandemic to respond.

The assertions are similar to those made by the United States, which is at odds with Beijing over multiple issues, including military drills in the resource-rich South China Sea and the origin of the new coronavirus.

On Monday, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had rejected China’s claims to offshore resources in most of the South China Sea, claiming that they were “completely unlawful.”

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