China warns NATO to stop ‘hyping up’ threat posed by Beijing

China on Tuesday issued a warning to NATO, saying the group needs to stop going after Beijing. 

The statement accused the group of a “Cold War mentality,” and said it needs to stop “hyping up” the threat posed by Beijing, a spokesperson of China’s mission to the European Union said, according to NBC News.

NATO is “slandering China’s peaceful development and misjudging the international situation and its own role,” the spokesperson said.

China’s statement comes after NATO said on Monday that the country poses “systemic challenges to the rules-based international order,” according to the outlet. 

China rebuked the statement, saying it won’t “sit by and do nothing if ‘systemic challenges’ come closer to us.”

“I think there is a growing recognition over the last couple years that we have new challenges,” President Biden said on Monday. “We have Russia that is not acting in a way that is consistent with what we had hoped, as well as China.”

The back and forth between NATO and China comes after G-7 leaders met to discuss how to compete with China, and called for the country to engage in a transparent investigation into the origins of COVID-19. 

“The days when global decisions were dictated by a small group of countries are long gone,” a spokesman for the Chinese Embassy responded.