United Nations general assembly: China rejects Trump’s ‘baseless’ Covid accusations – live

As Chile’s talk continues beyond the 15-minute deadline, Julian Borger has some analysis on China’s news-making speech:

Xi Jinping adopted the role of the adult superpower in the room in his address, presented in front of a painting of the Great Wall. Unlike Trump, he spoke the language of multilateral diplomacy. And he made news, declaring that China’s carbon dioxide emissions would peak by 2030 and the country would reach carbon neutrality by 2060, targets the EU has been urging Beijing to agree to.

Xi also announced some donations to UN funds – $50m to UN’s Covid-19 relief fund, and $50m to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation.

As it was a pre-recorded speech, there was no reaction to Trump’s attack, but there were some digs at unilateralism without naming the US or its president.

No country should “be allowed to do whatever it likes and be the hegemon, bully or boss of the world”, Xi said, which is a bit rich given China’s military build-up in the South China Sea and its aggressive posture on the border with India, not to mention its mass incarceration of Muslims.

“Burying one’s head in the sand like an ostrich or trying to fight globalization with Don Quixote’s lance will go against the trend of history,” the Chinese leader said, with a western literary reference apparently aimed at Trump. “The world will never return to isolation and no one can sever the ties between countries.”

Some more analysis, this time from our diplomatic editor, Patrick Wintour, on Turkey’s talk:

President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used his general assembly address to set out Turkey’s bitter objections to its exclusion from the East Mediterranean, but said he was ready to resume talks bound by international law to address their contested maritime claims in the eastern Mediterranean and Aegean. By his recent rhetorical standards, the speech was one of Erdoğan’s mildest.

His speech came at a highly sensitive time in the talks process following a video conference earlier on Tuesday between ErdoÄŸan, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and EU Council President Charles Michel.

Merkel is trying to mediate a deal whereby Turkey and Greece restart bilateral talks on their disputed maritime claims, and in return Turkey at a meeting of the EU Heads of State later this week is given assurances about modernising the Turkey-EU customs union. In a bid to pave the way for talks, Turkey pulled back one of its navy surveillance ships for what it described as routine maintenance, but was clearly a diplomatic gesture.

ErdoÄŸan told the UN his priority was to settle disputes by international law on an equitable basis. He warned no attack, harassment or intimidation of Turkey will be accepted.

The dispute has widened into a conflict between Turkey as upholder of the Palestinian cause, and the Arab Gulf States, such as the United Arab Emirates that have struck a peace deal with Israel. Turkey is also defending the rights of Turkish Cypriots on the divided island. Without mentioning France, Greece’s main supporter, he said futile attempts to exclude Turkey would have no chance of success, and blamed the dispute on Greece’s maximalists demands since 2003.

He also called for a regional conference in the Mediterranean including the Turkish Cypriots to promote a dialogue between the Med’s coastal countries. Turkey feels it was excluded when an East Med gas forum was set up last year that left out Turkey.

Before we get to the next speaker, here is some snap analyis on Trump’s address from my colleague, Julian Borger:

Trump’s speech was a barnstorming seven minutes, less than half the time he was allotted, and in a tone just short of yelling. It was a speech designed for a virtual campaign rally and that is its destiny, to be played on repeat on Republican social media.

Much of the speech was a ferocious attack on China. He named the country 11 times in all. In the first few seconds he had named Covid-19 the “China virus”, and called for Beijing to be held accountable.

Having dismissed the pandemic as affecting “virtually nobody” at a rally yesterday, he called the fight against it as a “great global struggle” comparable to the second world war. And Trump went on to make a series of false claims about what the US government was doing about the pandemic.

The first was the biggest. He said “we launched the most aggressive mobilization, since the second world war.”

In fact, the federal government has handed over leadership to the states, and its main impact was to broadcast misleading information, downplaying the threat. Trump was speaking just after the US passed the milestone of 200,000 dead from the pandemic – a statistic he did not mention.

There will be some relief in the UN, where there were fears that the US president would announce the severing of more US funding of the organisation. Instead the hostile fire was directed mostly on China. The brevity of the speech limited the number of targets.