President Joe Biden said on Wednesday he still regards Chinese leader Xi Jinping as a “dictator,” prompting a testy response from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which denounced Biden’s remarks as an “irresponsible political maneuver” but did not explain why Xi should be considered otherwise.
During his solo press conference after meeting with Xi for several hours at San Francisco’s historic Filoli estate on Wednesday, Biden was asked by CNN reporter MJ Lee if he stands by his characterization in June of Xi as a “dictator.”
President Joe Biden speaks during a news conference after his meeting with China’s President Xi Jinping at the Filoli Estate in Woodside, Calif., Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2023, on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperative conference (Doug Mills/The New York Times via AP, Pool).
Biden’s remarks in June were part of a rambling discussion he held with top campaign donors, during which he apparently disclosed national security information by talking frankly about the Chinese spy balloon incident in February.
“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two boxcars full of spy equipment in it is he didn’t know it was there,” Biden told his donors in June.
“No, I’m serious. That’s what’s a great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened,” he added.
On Wednesday, Biden tried to skirt around the issue a little by portraying dictatorship as a sort of alternative lifestyle but confirmed he still believes “dictator” is the proper term for Xi.
“Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours,” Biden told MJ Lee.
“Anyway, we made progress,” the president shrugged, pushing the administration’s line that his afternoon talks with Xi were highly productive.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry did not shrug off Biden’s remarks.
“This statement is extremely wrong and irresponsible political manipulation,” fumed Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning at her regular press conference on Thursday.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning (AP Photo/Liu Zheng, File)
“It should be pointed out that there will always be some people with ulterior motives who attempt to incite and damage U.S.-China relations, they are doomed to fail,” Mao sniffed, without identifying those “people” or whether Joe Biden is one of them.
Newsweek noticed that Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who was in the front row of the audience during Biden’s press conference on Wednesday, looked “visibly uncomfortable” when Biden made his unscripted remark about Xi being a dictator:
Some observers thought Blinken looked like he was about to have a nervous breakdown or that he was wincing in physical pain. Marco Carnelos, formerly Italy’s ambassador to Iraq, found Blinken’s reaction “priceless.”
“Twelve months of hard work and diplomacy thrown in the toilet with a simple word. WTF,” Carnelos remarked, using a commonplace abbreviation for an expression of disbelief that includes a vulgarity.
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