John Kerry refuses to call China’s Xi Jinping a ‘dictator’

July 14, 2023

President Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry broke with the commander-in-chief on Thursday and refused to refer to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator” during a hearing on Capitol Hill.

“There’s no question at all that President Xi is the major decider of the direction and of the policies of China,” Kerry, 79, told members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s oversight and responsibility subcommittee.

When pressed by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), who asked Kerry if Xi was “in fact, effectively a dictator,” the former Secretary of State stammered and said that it wouldn’t be “useful” to say that.

“He wields enormous power as the leader of China. Absolutely,” Kerry acknowledged.

Last month, Biden referred to Xi as a “dictator” who suffered a “great embarrassment” when one of his spy balloons sailed over the US without his knowledge, according to the president, earlier this year.

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry testified today during a hearing before the House Foreign Affairs Oversight and Accountability Subcommittee in Washington, D.C., the United States, on July 13, 2023.

“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened. That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course,” the 80-year-old president claimed at a fundraiser.

When asked by Issa if he wished Biden had used a different word during the event, Kerry said that he didn’t want to get tied up in “labels and names.”

“No, I don’t even – I just, frankly, all of that is like water off the duck’s back and I don’t think we ought to get tangled up in, you know, labels and names and whatever. What we ought to do is look at the heart of what we’re trying to do,” the climate envoy argued.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, who is also general secretary of the Communist Party of China Central Committee and chairman of the Central Military Commission.

Former United Nations ambassador and current Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley slammed Kerry for his reluctance to call Xi a dictator.

“In my book, wielding unchecked power, imprisoning your opposition, & committing genocide against your own citizens makes you a dictator,” Haley wrote in a tweet Thursday. “But that’s just me.”

Kerry’s testimony before the House panel comes ahead of a planned visit to Beijing next week where he will discuss climate change issues with Chinese government officials.

His trip follows a visit by Secretary of State Antony Blinken last month and will come a week after the departure of Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.