President Xi Jingping’s government on Wednesday, June 21, 2023, professed outrage at President Joe Biden’s dismissive reference to China’s leader as a “dictator” at a fundraising event late Tuesday, an apparent attempt to gain a rhetorical edge over Beijing.
“It is a blatant provocation. China expresses strong dissatisfaction and opposition,” Mao Ning, a spokeswoman for China’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters early Wednesday. “The U.S. remarks are extremely absurd and irresponsible.”
Speaking at a campaign fundraiser in California on Tuesday evening, Biden mocked what he framed as Xi’s ignorance about the circumstances leading up to a potential international crisis earlier this year when a Chinese spy balloon drifted across North America before a fighter jet shot it down off the coast of South Carolina.
“The reason why Xi Jinping got very upset in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two boxcars full of spy equipment in it is he didn’t know it was there,” Biden said.
“That’s what’s a great embarrassment for dictators – when they didn’t know what happened,” he added. “That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course up through Alaska and then down through the United States. And he didn’t know about it. When it got shot down, he was very embarrassed.”
Biden did not explain the source of the assertions, which appear to be based on U.S. intelligence assessments of the aftermath of the balloon incident.
What was ostensibly a passing jibe from the 2024 Democratic presidential candidate is widely seen as an attempt to burnish his tough-on-China credentials days after Secretary of State Antony Blinken traveled to Beijing and met with Xi to slow the steady deterioration of relations between the world’s two largest powers.
The rhetoric will all but certainly continue to heat up as Biden positions himself for reelection against a challenger from the Republican Party, which has consistently criticized his handling of Chinese economic and military aggression.
China has likewise attempted to portray the high-profile summit with the visiting diplomat as an example of U.S. acquiescence, a narrative Biden’s domestic political rivals, too, are eager to embrace.
Republicans have widely condemned the optics of Blinken’s trip, including imagery China has widely proliferated showing the chief U.S. diplomat sitting at a table in a grand meeting room listening to Xi, seated at the head and conspicuously higher up. Chinese state media has also drawn subtle attention to the fact the meeting took place on Father’s Day, suggesting that Beijing is moving toward a paternal relationship with America.
Blinken himself balked at questions on Tuesday when asked if the U.S. president sees his Chinese counterpart as an equal.
“I’m not quite sure how to take that question,” Blinken said from London, where he was traveling for a meeting with Ukraine’s international benefactors about reconstruction for the war-torn country. “President Xi is the leader of China and, in and of itself, that makes him someone of tremendous significance on the world stage.”
Aside from the balloon flap earlier this year, the summit also came amid reports China is investing heavily in new military and intelligence presences in Cuba – details first reported by The Wall Street Journal that the White House has subsequently downplayed as a potential threat it has already begun to address.
“China is trying to improve their global reach and influence and, again, their global intelligence collection capabilities,” John Kirby, a spokesman for the National Security Council, told reporters on a teleconference this week. “It's not like we aren't aware of it, it's not like we haven't been monitoring it and, quite frankly, it's not like we haven't taken steps and will continue to take steps to thwart it.”
Rep. Mike McCaul, Texas Republican and chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, blasted the summit as wasteful and said the Biden administration’s latest overtures to the Chinese Communist Party are deeply concerning and effectively toothless.
“Blinken brushing off the recent CCP spy balloon that traversed the U.S. was ridiculous and totally dismissive of the concerns of the American people,” the Texas Republican said in a statement in which also lamented what he considered Blinken’s inability to address other issues such as climate change, fentanyl imports to Mexico or returning Americans detained in China. “And just as troubling – China’s recent agreement with Cuba to house a CCP military training facility was not addressed during these meetings.
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