CHINA’S ambassador has slammed Britain and Donald Trump for “poisoning” their relationship by demanding coronavirus compensation.
Beijing has been accused of not reacting quickly enough to contain the killer bug, which has killed more than 250,000 people globally.
The US President has claimed the coronavirus originated from a lab in Wuhan and has suggest China would be punished for the outbreak.
The Chinese government has repeatedly denied the growing suggestions the virus came from a lab and not a wet market.
British politicians have also been critical of China, which was led to their ambassador to the UK to speak out.
Liu Xiaoming said “such talks are a political virus. If they go unchecked they’ll poison UK-China relations and even international solidarity”.
He also warned anti-China remarks by some British MPs on coronavirus threaten to “undermine mutual trust and cooperation” between Beijing and London.
More than 3.7million people have been infected with the killer bug as calls mount for an international independent investigation into where the virus started.
China’s ambassador to the UK has branded the calls for an international probe as ” political motivated”.
He told China Britain Business Council webinar: “We must stay on high alert and say no to these remarks.”
In direct reference to Mr Trump’s accusations, he added: “They want to pass the buck over their lack of response, lack of efforts to contain the virus, to China.
“There’s a game of blaming, scapegoating. It is not helpful for the international response.”
China still has questions to answer about where the coronavirus came from, Boris Johnson’s spokesman said on Monday.
He said: “I’m not going to comment on intelligence matters.”
But, he added: “Clearly there are questions that need to be answered about the origin and spread of the virus, not least so we can ensure we are better prepared for future global pandemics.”
Defence Secretary Ben Wallace yesterday said China needed to be “transparent and open” about the origin of coronavirus.
Speaking in on LBC, he said: “Every day I get intelligence bulletins from our agencies around the world. I don’t comment on individual bulletins, what I have and haven’t seen. That would be wrong.”
When asked if China has questions to answer about their coronavirus response, Mr Wallace added: “I think it does. The time for the post mortem on this is after we’ve all got it under control and have come through it and our economies are back to normal.
“China needs to be open and transparent about what it learnt, it’s shortcomings but also its successes.”
Today it was reported that Mr Trump will disclose the origins of the coronavirus, which the government suspects emerged from a Wuhan laboratory, and urged China to to be transparent.
“We will be reporting very definitively over a period of time,” the president said to reporters before departing for a trip to Arizona.
“We want them to be transparent. We want to find out what happened so it never happens again.”
Tensions between Beijing and Washington continued to escalate after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said there is “a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan”.
Asked by ABC news reporters whether he thought the virus was released accidentally or on purpose, he said: “I can’t answer your question about that because the Chinese Communist Party has refused to cooperate with world health experts.”
Several outlets in China ran articles on Monday critical of the remarks.
The Xinhua news agency branded Pompeo “one of the worst secretaries of the state in American history”.
State broadcaster CCTV ran a segment under the heading: “Evil Pompeo is wantonly spewing poison and spreading lies.”
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