North Korea lashes out, says US will be overshadowed by China

North Korea lashed out at the U.S. on Thursday, asserting that its ally China was quickly overshadowing the U.S. amid an ongoing spat between Washington and Beijing.

In a statement published by state media, Pyongyang excoriated Secretary of State Mike Pompeo for criticizing China in an interview on Sunday. During the interview, Pompeo accused Beijing of being “intent upon the destruction of Western ideas, Western democracies, Western values.”

“It is not the first time that he spouted nonsense about China over the issues of Hong Kong, Taiwan, human rights and trade disputes, but what cannot be overlooked is that he viciously slandered the leadership of the Communist Party of China over socialism,” North Korea’s ruling Workers’ Party said. 

“Pompeo, who has been deeply engrossed in espionage and plot-breeding against other countries, said that the Communist Party today is different from what it was a decade ago, which shows he acknowledges that socialism led by the Communist Party grows stronger day by day and he is anxious about the plight of the US which is doomed to ruin.” 

The broadside comes as President Trump and leaders in Beijing engage in a bitter back-and-forth over a number of topics, including whether the U.S. or China is to blame for the coronavirus and a new Chinese law that could curtail free speech in Hong Kong. It also follows halting attempts by Trump to reach out to North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un to try to reach a nuclear deal.

In the statement, North Korea also underscored protests that have spread across the U.S. since the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis. Trump has threatened to use the military to quell the demonstrations.

“This is the present reality of the crumbling US where demonstrators enraged by extreme racism throng even to the White House and it is American-style freedom and democracy to stigmatize the demonstrators as leftists and threaten to break up demonstration by setting even the dogs on them,” Pyongyang said.

The statement also panned Seoul after defectors from the North released anti-North Korean leaflets across the border, a move Pyongyang has long slammed as a propaganda tactic.

“What matters is that those human scum hardly worth their value as human beings had the temerity to fault our supreme leadership and cite ‘a nuclear issue,’ ” Kim Yo Jong, a North Korean spokeswoman and Kim’s sister, said in a statement run by state media, adding that Pyongyang could cancel an agreement to run a joint liaison office with the South and cease hostile military actions at the border.