Video has captured Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s reaction after President Joe Biden reiterated his belief that China’s President Xi Jinping is a “dictator.”
Biden held a press conference on Wednesday after he met his Chinese counterpart at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, as well as separate face-to-face talks at another location in San Francisco.
The meeting between Xi and Biden was seen as a crucial step in healing the fractured relations between China and the U.S. following Beijing pulling military contacts with Washington over former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last August. Tensions escalated further in February after the U.S. shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon on the East Coast.
During Wednesday’s solo press conference, Biden was asked if he still backed the comment he made in June that Xi was a “dictator”—a remark China blasted at the time as “extremely absurd and irresponsible” and “political provocation.”
Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
“Look, he is,” Biden said on Wednesday. “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.”
A clip of Biden’s comments were shared online, with several social media users noting the apparent uncomfortable reaction from Blinken.
Ginger Gibson, a senior Washington editor at NBC News, posted the video of Biden’s press conference on X, formerly Twitter, while urging people to “watch Tony Blinken’s body language when Biden says he thinks Xi is a dictator. It’s like you can hear him sucking in his breath.”
The X account for the conservative news site Citizen Free Press posted: “Blinken looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole when Biden said Xi is a dictator.”
Christine Duhaime, a journalist and financial crime expert, added: “Blinken reacting to Biden calling President Xi a dictator is priceless. You can tell he’s like jesussus no, in his head.”
China has not officially responded to the latest comments from Biden about Xi.
China’s president is said to have told Biden on Wednesday that the negative views of the Communist Party in the U.S. were unfair, a U.S. official told the press after the meeting.
The White House and the Chinese Foreign Ministry have been contacted for comment via email.
Blinken previously defended Biden after his previous “dictator” remark about the Chinese president, which arrived after the Secretary of State visited China to meet with Xi.
“The president always speaks candidly, he speaks directly, he speaks clearly, and he speaks for all of us,” Blinken told CBS’ Face the Nation in June.
Biden made the previous “dictator” comment about Xi at a campaign event in California while he was speaking about when the U.S. downed the suspected Chinese spy balloon earlier in the year.
“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. “That was the great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened.”
Xi won his third term as president in March after China’s National People’s Congress unanimously voted for him in an election in which there was no other candidate.
The White House said that Biden and Xi had “candid and constructive” discussions on a range of issues, with Biden also raising concerns regarding China’s “human rights abuses” including in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Hong Kong during the meeting.
Xi told reporters after the meeting that as long as the U.S. and China “respect each other, coexist in peace and pursue win-win cooperation, they will be fully capable of rising above differences and find the right way for the two major countries to get along with each other.”
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.