Chinese propaganda blasted President-elect Donald Trump as a “diplomatic rookie” and warned that the next American leader should shut up.
The excoriation came days after Trump took a congratulatory phone call from the president of Taiwan, a breach of diplomatic norms that apparently upset the Communist power.
“Provoking friction and messing up China-US relations won’t help ‘make America great again,’” said a front-page opinion article in the “People’s Daily,” a Communist Party vessel.
Likewise, warnings of Trump’s “inability to keep his mouth shut” and his “provocation and falsehoods” were the subject of a front-page article in the Chinese edition of the “Global Times.”
And the English “China Daily” newspaper warned that Trump could create “costly troubles for his country,” calling the soon-to-be president a “diplomatic rookie.”
“”As president-elect, Trump can expect some forgiveness even when he is shooting from the hip. But things will be different when he becomes president,” the China Daily stated.
Almost immediately following Trump’s phone call Friday with the Taiwan leader, a media firestorm began.
Trump threw gasoline on the flames by explicitly calling out China on his personal Twitter account.
“Did China ask us if it was OK to devalue their currency (making it hard for our companies to compete), heavily tax our products going into their country (the U.S. doesn’t tax them) or to build a massive military complex in the middle of the South China Sea? I don’t think so!” the president-elect wrote in two tweets on Dec. 4.
A US leader has not spoken to his Taiwanese counterpart in nearly four decades.
With Post Wires