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Donald Trump has issued a lengthy, defensive post on social media firing back at reports that the host of his visit to China, President Xi Jinping, thinks he’s leading the US into decline.
“When President Xi very elegantly referred to the United States as perhaps being a declining nation, he was referring to the tremendous damage we suffered during the four years of Sleepy Joe Biden and the Biden Administration, and on that score, he was 100 per cent correct,” wrote Mr Trump.
“President Xi was not referring to the incredible rise that the United States has displayed to the world during the 16 spectacular months of the Trump administration.
“In fact, President Xi congratulated me on so many tremendous successes in such a short period of time. Two years ago, we were, in fact, a Nation in decline. On that, I fully agree with President Xi! But now, the United States is the hottest Nation anywhere in the world, and hopefully our relationship with China will be stronger and better than ever before!”
The trigger for Mr Trump’s appears to have been a story in The New York Times headlined “China Increasingly Views Trump’s America as an Empire in Decline”.
“China increasingly casts itself not as a fading civilisation trying to catch up to the West but as a superpower poised to surpass it,” says Times journalist Li Yuan.
“Chinese nationalists and state-linked commentators say they have Mr Trump to thank. America under his rule, they say, validates Mr Xi’s worldview centered on ‘the rise of the East and decline of the West’.
“For decades, many Chinese viewed the United States with a mix of admiration, envy and resentment. America represented wealth, technological sophistication and institutional confidence. Even critics of Washington who reviled the American system often assumed that it worked.
“Mr Trump’s ascent and his volatile second term shattered that image.”
She goes on to cite a marked uptick in Chinese sources, mostly connected to the government, gloating about America’s decline since Mr Trump took office last January.
Read on for more updates.
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