US President Joe Biden “freezes” steps to relax tensions with China. In a speech delivered at a California fundraiser, the White House Number One called Xi Jinping, the president of China, a “dictator.”
On this occasion, Biden returned to the story of a spy balloon intercepted last February in US airspace, explaining that Xi Jinping was very angry because the Chinese President did not know about the balloon at that moment. “This is one of those things that confuses dictators a lot. When they don’t know what happened.”
The announcements likely will mark another step back from the de-escalation that followed Secretary of State Anthony Blinken’s visit to Beijing last week. At the end of the meetings, Blinken called them “constructive” and explained that he accepted the principle of “One China.” Xi acknowledged the progress, saying he hoped for “the stabilization of relations between China and the USA.”