California: US President Joe Biden has called Chinese President Xi Jinping a dictator at a fundraising event in California, media reports said.
US President Joe Biden on Tuesday called Chinese President Xi Jinping a dictator.
His remarks came a day after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met Xi Jinping for talks in Beijing, which were aimed at easing tensions between the two superpowers, according to BBC news.
Biden also said Xi Jinping was embarrassed after an alleged Chinese spy balloon was shot down by the US.
China is yet to respond to his comments.
“The reason why Xi Jinping got upset, in terms of when I shot that balloon down with two box cars full of spy equipment in it, was he didn’t know it was there,” Joe Biden said on Tuesday.
“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened,” he said.
The balloon, which China says was monitoring weather, drifted across the continental US before being destroyed by American military aircraft in February, BBC reported.
Washington later said it was part of a sprawling Chinese intelligence collection programme.
Blinken’s visit to Beijing, the first by a top US diplomat in almost five years, restarted high-level communications between the two countries.
He postponed the visit after the balloon incident.
