HONG KONG — Criticizing China was a popular campaign tactic for Democrats and Republican candidates alike in many campaigns this year, but Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York was quick to leap to China’s defense on Saturday.
“It is very dangerous for us as a society — I’m speaking of America — to focus on blaming others, because what you do then is you don’t focus on your own practices,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a news conference here.
He spoke after assuming the chairmanship of a coalition of 40 city governments around the world concerned about climate change.
Mr. Bloomberg was openly skeptical of the Obama administration’s decision on Oct. 15 to open a broad investigation into whether China violated World Trade Organization rules by subsidizing its exports of solar panels and other clean-energy products to the United States and by restricting imports.
“Let me get this straight,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “there is a country on the other side of the world that is taking their taxpayers’ dollars and trying to sell, subsidize things so we can buy them cheaper and have better products, and we’re going to criticize that?”
He said the United States also subsidized “an enormous number of industries.”
The World Trade Organization has restrictions on many kinds of subsidies. But its toughest bans are on export subsidies, in which a government tries to use its money to help its country’s companies buy market share in another country.
White House officials have acknowledged that the United States has subsidized the research, development and deployment of clean-energy technologies. But they have denied that the United States was subsidizing their export.
Zhang Guobao, the director of China’s National Energy Administration, strongly criticized the American investigation of Chinese practices at a news conference on Oct. 17 and emphasized that the United States had clean-energy subsidies; he did not draw a distinction between domestic subsidies and export subsidies.
Mr. Bloomberg also did not make that distinction. But he said some trade disputes could have merit.
“It isn’t that I think there isn’t some justification to some of these trade disputes,” he said, “but I think it is so dangerous for America” to lose its focus on bigger issues. Mr. Bloomberg added that he believed Chinese people who had ideas for great new businesses should be allowed to immigrate to the United States.
Mr. Bloomberg praised China for showing a much greater interest lately in environmental protection, even as he criticized the country for having allowed severe water pollution and other problems.
The mayor disavowed again on Saturday any interest in pursuing the presidency. He expressed sympathy for the challenges President Obama was facing, without providing specifics, and talked repeatedly about how attractive it was to be mayor.
In New York, the mayor’s office offered a terse comment on Saturday over a remark that Rupert Murdoch said Mr. Bloomberg had made about Mr. Obama after playing golf with the president over the summer.
In an interview with The Australian Financial Review, Mr. Murdoch said that after the outing on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Bloomberg “came back and said, ‘I never met in my life such an arrogant man.’ ”
Jessica Scaperotti, a spokeswoman for Mr. Bloomberg, said in an e-mail that “the mayor remembers the conversation differently. As he has said many times, he believes all Americans should be rooting for the president to succeed.”
The White House press office did not respond to requests for comment.
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