China has started attacking President Donald Trump and the United States for alleging that it is at fault for the pandemic that the world is now suffering. Chinese state media published editorials on Thursday and Friday which mocked the President and repeated the Chinese government line that all attempts to question their response to the pandemic are just ways to throw the blame at them for their own poor response to the disease.

The Global Times, one of the state-backed newspapers in China, alleges that the world believes that President Trump is insane for his threat to disengage the United States economically with China. The editorial was filled with quotes that came from supposed authoritative sources who all came from China. It was also peppered with the usual threats against any country that dares to cross the paths of the Chinese Communist Party. Jin Canrong, the associate dean of Renmin University of China’s School of International Studies in Beijing told the Global Times that the United States could not afford to cut ties with China, alleging that “the China-US relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world and involves huge interests of the two countries, as well as the rest of the world. Therefore, it is not something he can cut off emotionally.”

The People’s Daily claimed that the attempts of the United States and other countries to investigate its response to the deadly coronavirus pandemic is threatening the international rule of law when it comes to the sovereignty of countries. According to the paper, “the Charter of the United Nations (UN) stipulates the principle of sovereign equality. “Equals have no sovereignty over each other,” said the Roman law. The doctrine from ancient Rome has formed the basis of state immunity in the course of history and been supported by the judicial practice of the sovereign states nowadays.”

China is now using international law as a kind of shield to hide behind when it is convenient for it. But when other countries are using such laws against it, China would just disregard the same types of international rulings.

The People’s Daily also pushed for the theory that the virus might not have come from Wuhan or even China at all, alleging that there are cases of coronavirus infection that have been discovered earlier. They even pushed for the most extreme version of the story, which claimed that the virus was released intentionally by the American military in China as a kind of biomedical attack, which no one bought.