No matter how hard Xi Jinping may try to appease Joe Biden with his positive attitude, the US President still called the Chinese leader a "dictator.” The United States won't waste time talking to dictators.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden held an official meeting on November 15 in San Francisco as part of the APEC summit.
"Chinese leader Xi Jinping presented an amicable China ready to improve ties with the United States in a landmark meeting with US President Joe Biden Wednesday, marking a noticeable shift in tone for Beijing as it looks to minimize friction with Washington," CNN wrote in its analysis.
For its part, Bloomberg wrote with reference to Xi's and Biden's aides that the negotiations were warm and personal.
"Upon meeting in the morning, Xi and Biden held each others hands in a warm public gesture that's rare for the Chinese leader,” the agency wrote.
As soon as Xi went to rest, Biden reiterated his opinion of him as of a "dictator.”
"Well, look, he is,” Biden said. "I mean he's a dictator in the sense that he is the guy who runs a country which is a communist country based on a form of government totally different from ours,” Biden said.
Such remarks are regarded as an unforgivable mistake in diplomacy. In fact, it took Biden just one phrase to nullify all efforts to improve USA's relationship with China.
Why did he say that? Was Biden annoyed by the meeting or was he confident of his own words? Was it a manifestation of US arrogance or poor knowledge of the laws of diplomacy? This way or another, it was more than just strange to hear Biden calling the Chinese leader a dictator on the sidelines of the APEC summit. After all, Biden's experience in politics is more than just huge.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry called Biden's words "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. They will not succeed in doing so,” spokesperson Mao Ning said.
Bloomberg assumes that Biden's "dictator" remark could undermine the progress made in the negotiations.
The US and China agreed:
China has not released an official comment regarding the issue of Ukraine. The White House said that the United States could ensure Ukraine would emerge from the conflict as a democratic, independent, sovereign and prosperous country that would be able to deter and defend itself from future aggression.
Not a word about territorial integrity. Therefore, it could be Ukraine without many of the former territories.
Many analysts believe that the economic ties between the two countries are so strong that it is not beneficial for them, especially for China, to aggravate their relations. As we see, practice makes things completely different. Europe would not have abandoned Russian hydrocarbons otherwise, and Ukraine would not have abandoned good neighbourliness with Russia either.