China on Wednesday slammed US President Joe Biden for calling his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping a “dictator.”
Biden’s Remarks
At a campaign fundraising event in California on Tuesday, Biden said that Xi had been caught off guard with the news of the alleged Chinese surveillance balloon that flew into US airspace earlier this year.
Referring to the incident, which sent bilateral ties plunging to their lowest point in decades, Biden said that “the reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when [the US] shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment in it was he didn’t know it was there.”
It is “a great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened,” he said.
Biden further elaborated on the incident, saying that the balloon “was blown off course, up through Alaska and then down through the United States.” “And he didn’t know about it. When it got shot down, he was very embarrassed. He denied it was even there,” the US President went on.
President Joe Biden called China’s leader Xi Jinping a dictator, a day after top US diplomat Antony Blinken visited Beijing to stabilize bilateral relations that China says are at their lowest point since formal ties were established https://t.co/rKRAs4GQcB pic.twitter.com/fAuT6jOKLs
— Reuters (@Reuters) June 21, 2023
Chinese Response
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning called Biden’s remarks “extremely absurd and irresponsible,” adding that they “seriously violate basic facts, diplomatic protocols, and China’s political dignity.”
Beijing also said that the recent comments from Washington were “blatant political provocations.”
Blinken in China
Biden’s comments, which have once again infuriated China, come only a day after he praised his Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, for doing a “hell of a job” on his visit to China earlier this week. The president added that efforts to improve relations were “on the right trail”.
This is not the first time that Biden’s remarks about Xi have created a furore. While campaigning for the White House in 2020, Biden referred to Xi as a “thug,” adding that the leader “doesn’t have a democratic — with a small d — bone in his body.”