President Biden and Xi Jinping spent four hours together Wednesday, emerging from their working lunch and other meetings with "modest agreements" on everything from combating fentanyl to reestablishing military communications. Post-summit, however, Biden made a remark about his Chinese counterpart that's "likely to land with a thud in Beijing," per Reuters. Back in June, Biden had called Xi a "dictator," a sentiment that wasn't appreciated by the Chinese president. When asked Wednesday if he still felt that way, Biden concurred with his previous remarks, if only in a semantics way.
"Look, he's a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that's based on a form of government totally different than ours," Biden told CNN after Xi had left their Northern California meeting place. "Anyway, we made progress." A spokesperson for China's Foreign Ministry commented after Biden's comment, calling it "extremely erroneous" and "irresponsible." "What needs to be pointed out is that there will always be some people with ulterior motives attempting to undermine China-US relations," said Mao Ning. "They will not succeed in doing so."
Reuters notes that Xi ran unopposed in March for his third term, winning the unanimous vote of the 3,000 or so members of the National People's Congress. Despite the tense words after the two leaders' summit, Xi had offered a bit of an olive branch during their get-together: a hint that China's giant-pandas program with the US would resume, just days after three pandas were sent back to their homeland. "We are ready to continue our cooperation with the United States on panda conservation," Xi said, calling the pandas "envoys of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples," per the AP. (More Xi Jinping stories.)
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