WASHINGTON — China and the U.S. have locked themselves into a new cycle of recriminations, provoking fresh worries that the world’s two biggest economies are heading down a path that could one day lead to the once unthinkable: the possibility of open conflict.
The latest back-and-forth started Monday, when President Xi Jinping said in a speech that China was the victim of “comprehensive containment and suppression by western countries led by the U.S.” Two days later, U.S. Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines called Xi’s remarks “the most public and direct criticism that we’ve seen from him to date” — and she responded in kind.
China’s Communist Party “represents both the leading and most consequential threat to U.S. national security and leadership globally,” Haines told a Senate hearing that covered everything from dangers posed by TikTok, the Chinese-owned video-sharing app, to the threat of war over Taiwan to China’s role producing precursors to fentanyl, which kills tens of thousands of Americans every year.
