SAN FRANCISCO – US President Joe Biden reiterated this Wednesday that his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping is a “dictator”.
After meeting with him for more than four hours, Biden gave a press conference at the end of which a journalist shouted at him about whether he still thought Xi was a “dictator.”
“Well, you see, that’s it,” the American leader replied.
At a fundraiser for his re-election campaign for the 2024 elections last June, Biden called Xi a “dictator” for the first time, causing widespread unrest at the Asian giant.
At another fundraiser in San Francisco on Tuesday evening and on the eve of the long-awaited meeting, the US president said that China had “real problems” without specifying exactly what he meant.
This face-to-face meeting on the sidelines of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit is the first in a year between the two leaders, after they held together for about three hours during the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia in November 2022 had peaks.