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China accused G7 today of irresponsibly sowing division after the forum condemned Beijing's trade practices in a post-summit statement.

G7 leaders slammed China's "non-transparent and market-distorting" international trade tactics on Tuesday, vowing to reduce "strategic dependencies" on the Asian giant.

On Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian responded to the criticism, saying the statement demonstrated the allies' keenness "to create divisions and confrontations without any sense of responsibility or morality."

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At a regular press conference, Zhao stated that the G7 should "advance globalization" rather than encourage division "at a critical time for the international community fighting the pandemic and striving for economic recovery."

The G7 statement, in which leaders pledged to "foster diversification and resilience to economic coercion, as well as reduce strategic dependencies," came just hours before the leaders joined a larger group of their counterparts at a NATO summit in Madrid. There, the 30-member alliance was also poised to toughen its stance against Beijing.

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The United States has long been wary of China's trade practices, which it believes are designed to give Chinese firms an unfair advantage over foreign firms.

Russia's military operation in Ukraine, combined with Beijing's refusal to join the bandwagon of draconian sanctions directed against Russia, has caused other countries, including export powerhouse Germany, to retaliate by reconsidering their economic reliance on the Asian giant.

Beijing's increasingly assertive claims over much of the South China Sea have raised concerns about its military ambitions, which China repeatedly denied. But obviously, the NATO countries are more than willing to assume anything to justify any of their actions in any region where China's influence is growing. 

A US official called the collective statement "unprecedented in the context of the G7" in acknowledging "the harms caused by China's non-transparent, market-distorting, industrial directives."

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Yesterday, the G7 countries had held their last meeting in Germany last month, where they discussed the Ukraine war, China, and the situation in the Indo-Pacific region, Afghanistan, Africa, and West Asia.