During a NATO leaders' summit last week, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that the Alliance's new strategic concept saw China as a challenge to the security and values of NATO.

This comes as China urged NATO not to use the conflict in Ukraine to fuel a new Cold War.

While highlighting the breadth of an alliance facing challenges posed by Russia and China, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida attended the NATO Summit in Spain as the first Japanese leader to do so

At the summit, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said that Japan intended to significantly scale up its partnership with NATO after the Russian war against Ukraine, because Europe's security was inseparable from that of Asia, and praised the Western Alliance's involvement in the Indo-Pacific region.

Japan's prime minister said his country was seeking to update its partnership document with NATO to strengthen cooperation in areas such as cybersecurity and maritime, and planned to strengthen its defences over the next five years and significantly increase defense spending to deal with increased security threats, including those caused by China and its military strength.

In response to the Japanese Prime Minister's statement, China said that Japan's welcome to NATO's increased contribution to the Pacific and Indian Oceans was fuelling confrontation and hostility in the region.

China's envoy for the Korean peninsula, Liu Xiaoming, said in a tweet today: "Japan says it welcomes a greater contribution from NATO in the Indo-Pacific region. Japan appears to be planning to lead NATO's invasion of the Asia-Pacific region. This is driven entirely by selfish interests and the mentality of the cold war ".

This "will only fuel confrontation between blocs and create hostility and division in the region," he said, stressing: "It will not benefit Japan or any other regional state."

"East Asia is the most stable region in the world, a promising territory for cooperation, not an arena for geopolitical competition," he added, warning that "any attempt to undermine its peace and stability will be jointly rejected by the people of China and the rest of East Asia."