Schedium

Xi Jinping (AI-generated image) ______ On June 20, US President Joe Biden called People's Republic of China (PRC) leader Xi Jinping a “dictator” during a speech at a fundraiser in California.  Referring to the PRC spy balloon shot down on February 4 of this year, Biden said that Xi Jinping "got very upset" because "he didn’t know it was there", adding that it is "a great embarrassment for dictators" when they don't know that something as important as this has happened.  PRC foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said that Biden’s comments were "extremely absurd" and a "political provocation" which "seriously violated China’s political dignity". The US ambassador to the PRC was reportedly reprimanded over the comments. Several media organisations immediately rushed to give voice to Beijing's complaints about that characterisation.  "Biden calling Xi a dictator is his latest ad-lib to anger a foreign capital,...

Beijing National Stadium (by Peter23 via Wikimedia Commons ) On April 6 the US State Department denied that it was considering a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing  over the Chinese government's human rights abuses, including in Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Tibet. "Our position on the 2022 Olympics has not changed. We have not discussed and are not discussing any joint boycott with allies and partners," a senior State Department official wrote in a statement to CNBC. After years of tough anti-Beijing rhetoric from the Trump administration, voices of appeasement are already reemerging. The Financial Times argued that boycotting the Olympics would be ineffectual and would be the wrong solution.  Former Ambassador Christopher Robert Hill stated in a recent interview that the United States needs to be proactive in finding ways to communicate and collaborate more closely with China rather than pursuing a policy of decoupling.  "I do believe that we need to find ...