"China will own the United States if this election is lost by Donald Trump," Trump, referring to himself in the third person, told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. "If I don't win the election, China will own the United States. You're going to have to learn to speak Chinese, you want to know the truth."

His remark was the latest escalation in a contest with former Vice President Joe Biden over who can sound toughest on China, a battle that has become a central facet of the presidential campaign.

Trump blames China for failing to contain the spread of coronavirus and concealing information about the disease in its early stages. He says his once-chummy relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping has soured. And his administration has taken a series of actions that have heightened tensions with Beijing, including this week with the highest-profile visit by an American official to Taiwan in decades.

Yet even as the administration ratchets up pressure, Trump himself has declined on multiple occasions to condemn some of China's most provocative moves.

Pressed in the same interview Tuesday on a claim his former national security adviser made recently -- that Trump told Xi to proceed with detaining Uyghurs in camps in western China -- Trump chose not to condemn the repression.

Instead, he offered a cursory denial of John Bolton's claim while trashing his former aide.

"Who would ever say a thing like that? He made it up. He made up everything," Trump said. "John Bolton is a sick person. And John, and he's not a smart person."

In his book, Bolton wrote Trump discussed the detention camps built by the Chinese government for Uyghurs in western China during a dinner at the G20 last year.

"With only interpreters present, Xi had explained to Trump why he was basically building concentration camps in Xinjiang. According to our interpreter, Trump said that Xi should go ahead with building the camps, which Trump thought was exactly the right thing to do," Bolton writes.

The US State Department estimates that more than one million Uyghurs, ethnic Kazakhs, Kyrgyz and members of other Muslim minority groups have been detained by the Chinese government in internment camps, where they are reportedly "subjected to torture, cruel and inhumane treatment such as physical and sexual abuse, forced labor and death."

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has called Beijing's actions in Xinjiang "the stain of the century."

Yet Trump has voiced little public concern about the actions, and said in an interview earlier this month that he held off imposing sanctions on China because he was negotiating a trade deal.

Similarly, during a private phone call last summer with Xi, Trump promised that the US would remain quiet on pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong while trade talks continued, two sources familiar with the call told CNN last year.

Trump's parallel responses to the ethnic repression and the Hong Kong protests illustrate an unfolding dynamic as he works to paint Biden as an unworthy negotiator. Even as he seeks to project toughness, Trump

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