After meeting with Xi Jinping in California, Joe Biden said on Wednesday that he still considers Xi Jinping a “dictator,” using a phrase that has infuriated Beijing in the past, AFP reported, taken from news.ro.

At the end of the press conference at which the results of the summit were welcomed, the American president said that he still considers his Chinese colleague a “dictator”.

“He is a dictator in the sense that he is a person who leads a country, a communist country, which is based on a form of government that is completely different from ours,” he said, using a phrase that has angered Beijing of late.

However, the meeting will lead to the resumption of high-level military contact, suspended for more than a year, the two superpowers said.

According to Joe Biden, the four-hour summit, which took place in a luxurious residence about forty kilometers from San Francisco, was “constructive and productive.”

The 80-year-old Democrat assured the audience that the two men would be able to pick up the phone and talk “directly and immediately” in the event of a crisis.

The meeting, which was intended to give the impression of a new serenity (Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, for example, briefly posed for photographers during a short walk through a beautiful garden), clearly did not resolve any significant differences.

President Xi nevertheless agreed to take, according to the Americans, “a series of successive measures to significantly reduce the supply” of fentanyl components.

This powerful synthetic opiate, made with chemical compounds originating mostly from China, causes tens of thousands of overdoses in the United States each year.

The announcement is a welcome one for Joe Biden, who is campaigning for a second term and has been regularly accused by his Republican opponents of not doing enough to fight the drug trade.

Washington and Beijing also decided to mobilize a group of experts to discuss the risks associated with artificial intelligence.

Faced with the deteriorating economic and social situation in China, Xi Jinping does not want to appear weak, especially vis-à-vis Taiwan.

The status of the island, over which Beijing claims sovereignty and where presidential elections are due to be held soon, remains a key point of contention.

On Wednesday, Joe Biden asked Xi to “respect the electoral process” and reiterated a deliberately ambiguous US line: no support for independence, but a refusal to take control by force.

For his part, the Chinese president called on his counterpart to “stop arming Taiwan” because reunification, in his opinion, is “inevitable,” according to a Chinese diplomatic source.

Washington also expects that Beijing, a close partner of Iran and Russia, will not escalate major international crises: the conflict between Israel and Hamas and the war in Ukraine.

The two men had a meeting, respectively, with their respective delegations, followed by a small-group working lunch – tarragon chicken and almond pie on the menu – and finally a well-organized outing for the two of them for photographers and cameras.

It was a perfectly orchestrated summit after weeks of negotiations on the site of the 1980s soap opera Dynasty, nestled in the California hills.

At the beginning of the meeting, the American president asked to manage the rivalry “responsibly” to “ensure that it does not turn into a conflict.”

Xi Jinping, who warned of the “unbearable” consequences of the confrontation, said the United States and China could not “turn their backs,” according to an English translation.

“The planet is big enough for our two countries to thrive,” he said at a time when Washington and Beijing are engaged in fierce economic, technological, strategic and military competition.

However, he told Joe Biden that US economic sanctions were harming China’s “legitimate interests,” according to a state media report.

Xi Jinping and Joe Biden last spoke in November 2022 on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali.

Bilateral relations then became increasingly strained, even threatening to deteriorate when a Chinese hot air balloon flew over US territory earlier this year.

Washington denounced it as an espionage operation, which China denied.

In March, China’s president condemned America’s “encirclement” strategy at a time when the United States is strengthening its alliances in the Asia-Pacific region and imposing economic sanctions on China.

Over the summer, however, the tone softened enough to allow a face-to-face meeting in California.