The APEC summit hosted by US President Joe Biden last month in California was supposed to be a rapprochement with China after another year of incriminations and hostility - that’s why many were shocked to hear US President Joe Biden revive his old attacks on Chinese President Xi Jinping, who he called a “dictator” in comments at the summit.
“Well look, he is. I mean he is a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that is based on a form of government that is totally different from ours,” Biden told reporters when asked if he still believed Xi was a dictator.
Afterward, the Chinese Foreign Ministry called Biden’s words “extremely wrong and irresponsible political manipulation.”
When Biden made those remarks, his foreign minister, Antony Blinken, could be seen wincing in the background on footage of the presser, which many observers interpreted as him reacting to Biden putting his foot in his mouth again and potentially reversing some hard-fought diplomacy aimed at warming relations.
However, Blinken recently told US media that he was actually just really tired during the event.
“I’m tempted to say that we’d had a really long day, a very important and intense conversation with China. My neck was a little bit stiff. And, you know, that happens,” he said in a television interview that aired on Thursday.
“But look, as I said before, it’s not exactly a secret that we have a very different system from China’s. The president always speaks very clearly, very directly, and he speaks for everyone,” he added.
US-China relations have deteriorated considerably since 2017, when the Pentagon adopted a new strategy of “great power competition” with Russia and China, treating the two nations as leading an anti-American charge to undermine the so-called “rules-based international order” and supplant Washington as world leader.
Intense military and economic competition has followed, including heavy sanctions on leading Chinese economic fields, such as artificial intelligence and smart phone manufacturing, and provocative military patrols near Chinese territory.
Those relations healed somewhat that November, when Biden and Xi met face-to-face in Indonesia and pledged to peacefully compete and Biden foreswore any desire to “contain” China, and several subsequent high-level meetings since then have aimed at cementing that cold detente.