China on Wednesday accused the United States of "seriously hampering" the fight against climate change after its leaders met with harsh attacks from US President Trump in the UN General Assembly.

By withdrawing from international agreements aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, the US failed in its "duty" and "refuses to take minimal measures to protect the planet,"  said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman, Wang Wenbin.

Trump, a climate change skeptic who abandoned the Paris Agreement, said the day before in his virtual and prerecorded speech at the United Nations General Assembly, that his country has "an exceptional performance" in the environmental matter and lashed out "the endemic pollution of China", in a speech filled with self-praise that seemed more directed to his base than world leaders.

Chinese President Xi Jinping announced for the first time the goal of reaching carbon neutrality by 2060.

"Our goal is to have a maximum of CO2 emissions before 2030 and reach carbon neutrality before 2060," Xi said.

Beijing will increase its climate commitments under the Paris climate agreement, he added.

| These commitments are freely set by each signatory country, but they are binding and are supposed to be periodically revised upwards.

"We call on all countries to take decisive measures to comply with this agreement," added the Chinese president, implicitly underlining that the United States, the world's second-largest emitter, will withdraw from the pact in November, according to a Trump decision.

The president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, congratulated Beijing on Twitter for its announcement on the climate but warned that there is "much to do".

At the UN, the China of Xi Jinping and the United States of Donald Trump expressed their disagreements on other issues, starting with the management of the new coronavirus pandemic.

Six weeks before the presidential elections, Donald Trump, behind his rival Joe Biden in the polls, harshly criticized Beijing's handling of the pandemic, referring to COVID-19 as "the Chinese virus."

The Plague 
"We must hold the nation that unleashed this plague on the world, China, responsible," Trump said in his speech, in which he promised to "distribute a vaccine" and "end the pandemic" that has killed more than 200,000 people in his country, more than in any other nation in the world.

Xi said for his part that his country "has no intention of entering a Cold War." The Chinese president deplored the "politicization" of the fight against COVID-19, which has left almost a million dead in the world, and without naming the United States, asked not to fall "into the trap of a clash between civilizations."

The Chinese ambassador to the UN, Zhang Jun accused Trump of spreading "a political virus" in the General Assembly.