Attacks on China expose true colors of Biden administration's 'guardrails': China Daily editorial

As predicted, China was again one of the focal points in the $770-billion National Defense Authorization Act the US Senate overwhelmingly approved on Wednesday. About 5 percent more than last year, the bill includes $7.1 billion for the Pacific Deterrence Initiative and a statement of congressional support for the "defense of Taiwan", as well as a ban on the Department of Defense procuring products "produced with forced labor from Xinjiang".

That constitutes an open violation of the three Sino-US joint communiques, and the one-China policy that the United States said it upholds, and represents the US' latest efforts to intervene in China's internal affairs on groundless charges.

On the same day, it was reported that the US Treasury will place another eight Chinese companies on an investment blacklist for their alleged involvement in the "surveillance" of Uygur people in China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region.

This will be the second batch of Chinese entities the US has blacklisted in a week, indicating the Joe Biden administration has no qualms about carrying out its predecessors' dirty tricks of long-arms jurisdiction and trade bullying.

At the just concluded "summit for democracy" it hosted, the Biden administration went to great lengths to depict China as being guilty of the heresy of not being committed to US values. And at the following G7 foreign ministers' meeting in London last week, it orchestrated a chorus condemning China as a challenger to the rules that the US has drawn up for the world.

Although he had to cut it short due to a COVID-19 infection among his delegation — having ironically assured his hosts that the US will fight the novel coronavirus shoulder to shoulder with them — the US' top diplomat was on a three-nation visit to Southeast Asia in a bid to isolate China in the region.

As such, it is fair to say that the Biden administration is leaving no stones unturned in shaking the foundations of the Sino-US relationship. That raises the question of how sincere the US leader was in calling for "guardrails" to prevent Sino-US competition from veering into conflict during his recent talks with his Chinese counterpart via video link last month.

The US' hypocrisy in preaching values and morality while engaging in such dirty deeds against China is beyond question.

As the most powerful country, the US should shoulder its global responsibilities with sincerity and good grace. It should rally countries to address the COVID-19 pandemic, poverty, terrorism and climate threats. Instead, it is trying to divide the world into countries that it considers "friends" and those that are not, based on how malleable they are to its will.

The Biden administration keeps talking about the "rules-based order" but its actions show that it considers the US to be the law unto itself.