Joe Biden believes describing Xi Jinping as a ‘dictator’ carried no consequences yet China’s anger simmers

Former U.S. President Donald Trump was often a thorn in China’s side but his comments on Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 were friendly, bordering on the affectionate.

In 1997, Trump said the pair had developed a friendship, adding: “I think in the long term we’re going to have a very, very great relationship and I look very much forward to it.”

When he spoke about Xi on Twitter, Trump usually used capital letters, before thanking him profusely for his assistance on issues such as COVID-19, North Korea, and climate change.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020, Trump said: “Our relationship with China has now probably never, ever been better,” insisting that he liked Xi a lot. “He’s for China, I’m for the U.S., but other than that, we love each other.”

Biden has a very different tone on Xi to Trump

Joe Biden is more aloof. In 2021, he expressed the view that the Chinese leader believes that democracy doesn’t have a future.

Biden said he spent “hours upon hours” with Xi when he served as vice president under Barack Obama. He told reporters: “He’s one of the guys, like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin, who thinks that autocracy is the wave of the future, democracy can’t function in an ever-complex world.”

Biden told a news conference at the White House: “He doesn’t have a democratic — with a small ‘d’ — bone in his body, but he’s a smart, smart guy.”

In May of 2023, Biden said in Hiroshima that he believed there would soon be a thaw in U.S.-China relations. Then on June 20, 2023, the president made a stinging remark which had immediate diplomatic repercussions.

Speaking at a fundraising event in California, Biden discussed an alleged Chinese spy balloon, which had recently floated over the United States.

In reference to the balloon, Biden said that Xi “didn’t know it was there”. He continued: “That’s the great embarrassment for dictators; when they didn’t know what happened.”

The following day, China’s ambassador to the U.S., Xiè Fēng 谢锋,, lodged strong protests with both the White House and the State Department. However, when Biden was challenged about his comment by reporters, he responded calmly: “I don’t think it’s had any real consequence.”

Biden appeared to suggest that the Chinese leader was weak because he did not realize the balloon was flying above the United States. Professor Steve Tsang, Director of the SOAS China Institute, believes that from China’s perspective, this was an offensive suggestion.

Speaking to the China Project, Tsang said:

Whether one uses the word “dictator” or not is beside the point. Xi likes to project himself as the supreme leader of a Leninist Party, whose ideas and words cannot be challenged or disobeyed. He commands the CCP, the PLA and other security apparatus to ensure that his instructions are followed. Presumably that’s what Biden had in mind when he used the “d” word. Most people in democratic countries would agree with such usage.

Bill Bishop, author of the Sinocism newsletter, observes that Biden is fond of saying that the world is divided into rival camps of democracies and authoritarian countries — a view Beijing regards as a “Cold War mentality.”

“In their propaganda and in their foreign affairs rhetoric, the Chinese insist that no one country has a monopoly on how democracy should be defined,” says Bishop.

This perspective was emphasized in a response to Biden’s remarks offered to The China Project by Xú Zéyǔ 徐泽宇, a journalist from the state news agency, Xinhua in Beijing. He criticized Biden’s “obsessive need” to put labels on other nations. He told The China Project that “Western exceptionalism has bred the dominant ideology in the Pax Americana in the wake of the Cold War. However, the present world order, leaning towards multipolarity, has outgrown such fallacious, distasteful rhetoric.”

A challenge to Xi Jinping is a challenge to China’s core leadership

Bill Bishop told The China Project that any sort of perceived affront against Xi personally must be met with a vociferous response. “It’s thoroughly predictable and understandable, given the way they talk about their system. In their view, Máo Zédōng 毛泽东 was not a dictator. In Xi Jinping’s new era, one of the key political tenets for anyone in the system is to safeguard and protect the core; the core being Xi Jinping.”

Xu Zeyu from Xinhua says it is not hard to see why Biden’s remarks were deemed “erroneous, absurd and irresponsible” by the Chinese embassy in Washington. We asked his view on the concept of China as a “one party dictatorship”. Zeyu Xu told us:

“As a nation and a civilization, China has a history of several thousand years, validated by uninterrupted written records. For the most part of that time span, China was not, and could not be defined by simplistic ideas invented in the Western value system. The word “dictatorship,” coined in ancient Rome, certainly does not fit in China’s context today. We have seen too many phrases like this in the mainstream Western media to create an “otherness” for their home audience. This is how stereotypes are reinforced in an echo chamber, and how stereotypes grow into a catalyst for many cross-nation, cross-culture conflicts. I certainly do not expect any serious scholar would play fast and loose with such definitions in the academic realm.”

Xu explained that his responses to our questions were approved at a high level in Beijing, suggesting that his opinions align with those of people who hold senior positions within China’s leadership.

In Xu’s view, Biden’s language has become an obstacle to a potential China-U.S. detente. “His comments put bilateral relations in jeopardy almost immediately after U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s high-profile visit to Beijing (in June 2023). This move contradicts Biden’s previous claim that he expected a “thaw” with China.”

But In the view of Tsang from SOAS, China’s irritation over the dictator remark is unlikely to have much material impact on the relationship between Xi and Biden: “Ultimately, the actions of America in the economic field are far more significant for China than terms used by a politician at a fund-raising event or on the political stump.”