Biden is right: China’s Xi is a ‘dictator’

Just as a stopped clock shows the correct time twice a day, so president Joe Biden, amidst the plethora of gaffes that regularly issues from his lips, occasionally utters the plain and unvarnished truth. So it was at a Democratic fundraiser in California yesterday when Biden called China’s president Xi Jinping ‘a dictator’. Explaining why he gave the order to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon that entered US airspace in February, the president said that Xi had been ‘embarrassed’ because the balloon had been blown off course and ‘he didn’t know it was there’.

US diplomats, like secretary of state Anthony Blinken (who has just inconclusively met Xi in Beijing), may have winced when they heard Biden’s unscripted candid comment. But, for the rest of us, the president’s frank remark – like the child who called out the Emperor’s lack of clothes – was a refreshingly honest observation.

For the Chinese leader is indeed a dictator and a particularly ruthless one at that who is bent on establishing Chinese world domination and hegemony.