On Sunday, a spokesman for China’s defense ministry blasted the U.S. as the “destroyer of world peace” while criticizing an annual Pentagon report on Beijing’s increasingly belligerent military goals.

This statement is a rebuttal of the Pentagon’s annual report to Congress on Chinese military developments and goals that was released in early September. According to the report, Chinese goals may have “serious implications for U.S. national interests and the security of the international rules-based order.”

Spokesman Colonel Wu Qian called the Department of Defense’s report a “wanton distortion” of China’s intentions.

“Many years of evidence shows that it is the U.S. that is the fomenter of regional unrest, the violator of the international order and the destroyer of world peace,” he said.