The China-US war of words continue as Beijing warned Washington on Monday of retaliation after President Donald Trump announced restrictions on Chinese students in the US in protest over a new national security law in Hong Kong.

Trump said on Friday that the United States would ban some Chinese graduate students and start reversing Hong Kong’s special status in customs and other areas, as Beijing moves ahead with a plan to impose a controversial security law. The US president said the Chinese government had been “diminishing the city’s longstanding and very proud status”. But China reacted angrily to the moves on Monday, saying it was “detrimental to both sides”.

“Any words and actions that harm the interests of China will be met with counter-attacks on the Chinese side,” said foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian at a regular briefing, without providing details. He said Washington’s measures “seriously interfere in China’s internal affairs and undermine US-China relations”.

China’s rubber-stamp parliament on Thursday approved plans for the law, which would punish secession, subversion of state power, terrorism and acts that endanger national security, as well as allow Chinese security agencies to operate openly in Hong Kong. The move followed seven months of huge and sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong last year.

United States has also commented on the recent Indo-China border standoff in Ladakh. China is using a tactical situation on the ground to its advantage and it has been making threats, like the one that is happening on its border with India, for a long time, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Sunday.

Pompeo, responding to a question on the aggressive Chinese behaviour on the India-China border and the South China Sea during an interview with Fox News, said that the threat posed by China is real.

“The Chinese Communist Party has been on this effort, on this march, for an awfully long time. They’ll certainly use a tactical situation on the ground to their advantage. But each of the problems that you identified there are threats that they have been making for an awfully long time,” he said.

Earlier, President Trump had also offered to intervene in the ongoing tension across the LaC, however, China firmly said that it was their matter and did not require any third party’s intervention.