US President Joe Biden has stated that he has not changed his opinion that Chinese President Xi Jinping is effectively a dictator, a remark that is likely to resound in Beijing after the two leaders held straightforward summit talks after months of planning.
After four hours of talks with Xi on the outskirts of San Francisco, Biden held a solo news conference. At the end of the news conference, he was asked if he still believed Xi was a dictator, as he stated in June.
Biden said “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.”
Xi won a third term as President in March when nearly 3,000 members of China’s parliament, the National People’s Congress, voted unanimously for him in an election with no other candidates.
After a decade of consolidating power in policymaking and the military, as well as stifling media freedoms, Xi is widely regarded as China’s most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.
The Chinese delegation, which had traveled to the United States to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, did not respond immediately.
China branded Biden’s June remarks as absurd and provocative after he made a similar allusion to a dictator. However, the argument did not stop the two parties from having lengthy discussions about mending their strained relationship.
Nevertheless, Biden’s stance on the Communist Party came up during the discussion. After the meeting, a U.S. official told reporters that Xi informed Biden that the negative perceptions of the Communist Party in the United States were unjustified.
