Amid spiralling trade war between the world's two biggest economies, US Vice President JD Vance's "Chinese peasants" remark has once again come back to bite him, with a top Chinese official using the same word to describe Americans.
China's foreign ministry had condemned Vance's comments made during a Fox News interview, when he said, "We borrow money from Chinese peasants to buy the things those Chinese peasants manufacture."
Referring to Vance's uncouth remarks, one of China's top officials last week said US President Donald Trump's "extremely shameless" tariff war would backfire soon, leaving "those peasants in the US" wailing.
Xia Baolong, who is the director of China's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office under the State Council, last Tuesday said bullying had never worked on Chinese people, including those from Hong Kong.
Xia said that "let those peasants in the United States wail in front of the 5,000 years of Chinese civilisation".
"The Chinese people do not cause trouble, nor are they afraid of trouble. Pressure, threats and blackmail are not the right way to deal with China," he added, according to news agency Reuters.
The comments came amid escalating tension between Beijing and Washington. China has hiked its levies on imports of US goods to 125 per cent, hitting back at US President Donald Trump's decision to single out the world's No.2 economy for effectively raising tariffs on Chinese goods to 145 per cent.
Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China, is subject to US tariffs imposed on Beijing as it is no longer considered a separate trading entity by Washington amid a years-long crackdown under a sweeping national security law.
However, unlike the mainland, Hong Kong, as an international free trade hub, is not planning to impose any retaliatory tariffs on the US right now, its leader, John Lee, said last week.
The Trump administration has used the sword of levies to engage several countries in negotiations with the United States to lower tariffs. But Beijing has dismissed the US president's tariff strategy as a "joke."
The US President, however, has insisted that the United States was in talks with China on tariffs, adding that he was confident the world's largest economies could make a deal to end the bitter trade war.
"Yeah, we're talking to China...I would say they have reached out a number of times...I think we're going to make a very good deal with China," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Thursday.
China, meanwhile, has vowed to fight a trade war "to the end" and has not confirmed that it is in talks with Washington, though it has called for dialogue.
It has slammed what it calls "unilateralism and protectionism" by the United States -- and warned about an international order reverting to the "law of the jungle".
"Where the strong prey on the weak, all countries will become victims," Beijing said Monday.
