US President Joe Biden said Wednesday he still believes Chinese President Xi Jinping is a dictator, even as the two leaders made progress in their relationship during a meeting outside San Francisco.
“Well, look, he’s a dictator in the sense that he is a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that’s based on a form of government totally different than ours,” Biden told CNN’s MJ Lee. “Anyway, we made progress.”
When asked about Biden’s latest comment at a Chinese Foreign Ministry briefing on Thursday, a spokesperson called it “extremely erroneous” and an “irresponsible political maneuver, which China firmly opposes.”
I get where you’re coming from but that’s not an argument about the defining characteristics of dictatorships, that’s an argument about the existence or lack thereof of free speech.
In my opinion a better argument would be that China has 1 leader at the top of the ladder with near unquestionable power over government precedings who will remain in that position until he either dies or chooses to step down. That already would make him something analogous to a monarch, but add the regular use of military strength in forcing compliance from the masses and now we have a dictator.