Joe Biden estimated on Wednesday that his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping was encountering “enormous problems” especially on the economic level.
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“Find me a single world leader ready to swap places with Xi Jinping… I can’t find one,” asserted the American president during an interview with the PBS channel.
“This man has huge problems”, in particular “an economy that does not work very well”, he judged, noting however that the Chinese leader “also had a lot of potential”.
Noting that Chinese support for Russia had been relatively quiet, Joe Biden pointed out that, contrary to what “everyone assumed” at the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Beijing was not “fully” committed behind Moscow. .
A reservation, according to him, linked to Xi Jinping’s desire not to suffer the same fate as Russia, which has in particular been subject to harsh economic sanctions imposed by the West.
“I called him this summer to tell him, + This is not a threat, just an observation: look at what happened to Russia +”, said Joe Biden on Wednesday.
The White House tenant met Xi Jinping in person for the first time in his term as president in November, at the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia. They had already spoken by telephone or videoconference five times.
The head of the American diplomacy, Antony Blinken, last week canceled a planned visit to Beijing, after the entry into the airspace of the United States of a Chinese balloon, since shot down by the American army.