US President Joe Biden said he had not changed his mind about President Xi Jinping being a dictator after the two leaders held straightforward summit talks.
After four hours of meetings with Xi on the outskirts of San Francisco, Biden conducted a solo news conference. At the end of the news conference, he was asked if he still believed Xi was a tyrant, as he stated in June.
"Look at him. "He's a dictator in the sense that he runs a communist country that is based on a form of government that is completely different than ours," Biden said.
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In reaction, China's foreign ministry stated that it "strongly opposes" the remarks but did not identify Biden.
"This statement is extremely wrong and irresponsible political manipulation," foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters during a routine press conference on Thursday.
"It should be pointed out that there will always be some people with ulterior motives who attempt to incite and damage U.S.-China relations, they are doomed to fail."
In response to a follow-up query, Mao declined to say who "some people" were.
Xi was re-elected president for a third time in March when over 3,000 members of China's rubber-stamp parliament, the National People's Congress, voted unanimously for him in an election with no other candidates.
After a decade of consolidating authority in policymaking and the military and suppressing media freedoms, Xi is regarded as China's most powerful leader since Mao Zedong.
The Chinese team, which had traveled to the United States to attend the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in San Francisco, did not respond immediately. Around noon, hundreds of Beijing opponents marched through the city's downtown, screaming "Free Tibet" and "Free Hong Kong."
When Biden made a similar dictatorial comparison in June, China dismissed the remarks as ludicrous and provocative. The quarrel, however, did not stop the two sides from undertaking extensive negotiations to repair strained relations, culminating in Wednesday's meeting.
