Joe Biden assessed on Wednesday that his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping is facing “enormous problems”, especially on an economic level.
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“Find me just one world leader who is willing to trade places with Xi Jinping…I can’t find one,” Trump said in an interview with PBS.
“This man has huge problems,” particularly “an economy that isn’t working very well,” he said, noting that the Chinese leader “also had a lot of potential.”
Noting that Chinese support for Russia has been relatively quiet, Joe Biden pointed out that contrary to what “everyone assumed” at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Beijing is not “completely” behind Moscow .
A caveat that he says is linked to Xi Jinping’s desire not to suffer the same fate as Russia, which has faced particularly harsh economic sanctions from the West.
“I called him this summer to tell him + That’s not a threat, just an observation: look at what happened to Russia, +” Joe Biden said Wednesday.
The White House tenant met Xi Jinping in person for the first time during his tenure as president at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia in November. They had already spoken to each other five times by telephone or video conference.
The chief of US diplomacy, Antony Blinken, canceled a planned visit to Beijing last week after a Chinese balloon entered United States airspace after it was shot down by the US army.