Over the weekend, China put on a little "good cop, bad cop" routine.
On Saturday, at a gathering of G-20 foreign ministers in Japan, Chinese State Councillor Wang Yi delivered a series of inflammatory remarks which, taken together, amounted to a wholesale rebuke of US foreign policy.
In addition to chastising US lawmakers for supporting pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong, Wang called the US "the world’s biggest destabilizing factor." The Trump administration, Wang charged, "is broadly engaged in unilateralism and protectionism, and is damaging the multilateral trading system."
That was the "bad cop."
"Good cop"