Following a meeting between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in San Francisco on Wednesday, Biden’s remark could jeopardise US-China relations, Time reported.
A CNN reporter asked Biden if he still considers Xi a dictator, and the US president responded:
Well, look, he is. I mean he’s a dictator in the sense that here’s a guy who runs a country that is a communist country based on a form of government totally different than ours.
The two leaders met face-to-face for the first time in a year in an effort to mend deteriorating relations and agreed to co-operate on military communications, artificial intelligence and restricting the flow of fentanyl from China to the US.
However, Biden’s comment could spoil efforts to reduce tensions. China’s Foreign Ministry declared Thursday that it “strongly opposed” the statement, which ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning described as “extremely wrong and irresponsible political manipulation.”
“It should be pointed out that there will always be some people with ulterior motives who attempt to incite and damage US-China relations, they are doomed to fail.”
It is not the first time Biden has called his Chinese counterpart a dictator. Last January, he stated that China and Russia were betting that the US would “become more like them,” meaning, as he explained, “a place for the autocrat, the dictator, the strongman.”
Then, in April 2022, during a speech at a Democratic Party fundraising event, he listed China as one of the countries that were “essentially dictatorships.”
In June this year, Biden once again called Xi a dictator, explaining that the reason Xi was upset after the US shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon in US airspace in February was because the Chinese president was caught off guard by everything that was going on.
That’s what’s a great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened.
After Wednesday’s post-summit briefing, the White House offered no comment or clarification on Biden’s latest “dictatorial” remarks.
