The White House confirmed Friday that an official diplomatic reprimand, known as a démarche, had been given to the US Ambassador to China Nicholas Burns following President Joe Biden’s comments comparing China’s Xi Jinping to a dictator at a political fundraiser in California earlier this week.
The Chinese government called in Burns for the meeting this week in Beijing to protest Biden’s remarks, according to two US officials familiar with the matter. The move by Beijing comes as officials are still assessing the potential effect of Biden’s comments on US efforts to repair the fractured relationship between the two countries.
While confirming the development and declining to provide specifics, National Security Council’s coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby stressed that the White House does not view the move as one with particularly significant consequences and that the US has not seen any further ramifications to the already-precarious relationship with China.
“If démarche issued by nations against other nations were some sort of bellwether for whether a relationship was collapsing or, or in any danger. I mean, my goodness, I mean, my goodness, Jeremy, a démarche is a démarche that happens all the time. I am not going to get into the specifics. I’m not going to get into the specifics of this one,” Kirby said in a back-and-forth exchange with CNN’s Jeremy Diamond.
The démarche came as the Chinese Foreign Ministry and the Chinese embassy in Washington put out statements condemning Biden’s remarks, which came just hours after Secretary of State Antony Blinken had concluded his first trip to Beijing as America’s top diplomat.
Biden on Thursday downplayed the impact of his off-the-cuff remarks, even as China has warned that there will be “consequences” with the Chinese embassy in the US describing it as a…
Read the full article here
Leave a Reply