US President Joe Biden on Tuesday equated Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) with “dictators” as he addressed a Democratic Party donors reception.
Speaking at a campaign fundraiser in northern California, Biden said that Xi had been angered over an incident in February when a Chinese balloon — which Washington says was used for spying — flew over the US before being shot down by US military jets.
“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment is he didn’t know it was there,” Biden said. “I’m serious. That was the great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened.”
Photo: AFP
“That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was ... and he didn’t know about it,” Biden said of Xi. “When it got shot down, he was very embarrassed and he denied it was even there.”
Biden waived off concerns about Beijing, telling donors that “China has real economic difficulties.”
The remarks raised strong objections from Beijing, where US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited just days earlier in an attempt to lower the temperature between the two global powers.
Still on the subject of China and Xi, Biden said: “We’re in a situation now where he wants to have a relationship again.”
Blinken “did a good job” on his Beijing trip, but “it’s going to take time,” he said.
He raised another prickly point regarding China: A summit at which leaders of Australia, India, Japan and the US — known as the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad) — sought to boost peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region.
The four countries are “working hand in glove in the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean,” Biden said. “What he [Xi] was really upset about was that I insisted that we unite the ... so-called Quad.”
In Beijing yesterday, China called Biden’s dictator comment “extremely absurd and irresponsible.”
Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Mao Ning (毛寧) said that the comments “go totally against facts and seriously violate diplomatic protocol, and severely infringe on China’s political dignity.”
“It is a blatant political provocation. China expresses strong dissatisfaction and opposition,” Mao said at a daily briefing. “The US remarks are extremely absurd and irresponsible.”
Additional reporting by AP
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