Biden calls Xi a dictator after carefully planned summit
US PRESIDENT Joe Biden said on Wednesday he had not changed his view that Chinese President Xi Jinping was effectively a dictator, a comment likely to land with a thud in Beijing after the two leaders held straightforward summit talks after months of preparation.
Biden held a solo news conference after four hours of talks with Xi on the outskirts of San Francisco. At the end of the news conference, he was asked whether he still held the view that Xi was a dictator, something he said in June.
“Look, he is. He’s a dictator in the sense that he’s a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours,” Biden said.
The Chinese foreign ministry responded to Biden’s rhetoric calling Xi a “dictator” as “extremely wrong and an irresponsible political manipulation. China firmly opposes it”.
“There are always ill-intentioned people who try to drive a wedge between China-US relations, which will not succeed,” ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a press briefing.
Asked to clarify who she was referring to, Mao demurred, saying: “I think whoever is trying to undermine and sow discord between China and the United States knows it.”
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Last March, Xi clinched a third term as president when nearly 3,000 members of China’s rubber-stamp Parliament, the National People’s Congress, voted unanimously for him in an election in which there was no other candidate.
Xi is considered the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, after a decade of consolidating power in policy-making and the military, and stifling media freedoms.
When Biden made a similar dictator reference in June, China called the remarks absurd and a provocation. But the spat did not prevent the two sides from holding extensive talks aimed at improving strained relations, which culminated in Wednesday’s meeting.
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Still, Biden’s opinion of the Communist Party was a topic of the Wednesday meeting. Xi told Biden that the negative views of the Communist Party in the United States were unfair, a US official told reporters after the meeting. REUTERS
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