China warns NATO against expansion into Asia Pacific region

China's ambassador to Russia has strongly warned the United States-led Western military alliance of NATO against expansion into the Asia-Pacific region.

"NATO’s expansion to the east, to the Asia Pacific region will only increase regional tension, add to the crisis of confidence," Zhang Hanhui told Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency in an interview on Tuesday.

The alliance's eastward advances also threaten "to spur an arms race, spoil the atmosphere of regional cooperation, provoke confrontation between the camps, and even a new Cold War," the envoy added.

Observers have been similarly warning that the US-led alliance was no longer confined to its traditional military missions, and was aggressively expanding its footprints in the Asia-Pacific region as means of besieging China.

Group says NATO expanding footprints in Asia-Pacific region to besiege China

A Chinese media commentary says NATO is no longer confined to its traditional military missions but aggressively expanding its footprints in the Asia-Pacific region

The development, they say, is more than anything evidenced by the US's trying to forge stronger military ties with its already close Asian allies Japan and North Korea, and its overtures targeting the semi-autonomous Chinese city of Hong Kong and the Chinese Taipei.

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Zhang said, "Voices of the opposition [to NATO's eastward expansion] are heard even among NATO members," recalling that "French President Emmanuel Macron publicly spoke against establishing a NATO liaison office in Japan, stressing that the alliance’s charter clearly defines its geographical frames of the North Atlantics, with Japan being outside them."

Last month, the alliance held a summit in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, releasing a joint communiqué that mentioned China on a dozen occasions and claimed again that Beijing posed a "systemic challenge" to Euro-Atlantic security.

The summit even featured NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg's saying openly that in the future, dealing with the "China threat" had to be an important basis for NATO's survival.

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