Alwaght- Chinese foreign ministry has summoned the US ambassador to Beijing a day after the US president called President Xi Jinping of China a “dictator.”
Beijing has strongly protested at the jibe to its leader, Chinese media outlets reported.
Biden labeled the Chinese leader a dictator only a day after an important visit to Beijing of the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and talks with his Chinese counterpart.
China's embassy in Washington on Thursday stated that “If Joe Biden does not back down from his comments about the Chinese president, America will have to bear the consequences.”
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.
China immediately hit back, saying: “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 US remarks are extremely absurd and irresponsible.”
Relations between Beijing and Washington have been frayed over the past few years over a set of issues from trade to Chinese support to Russia in its campaign in Ukraine.
The West accuses Beijing of backing Moscow war, but China denies it backs Russian special military operation” in Ukraine.
