The special climate envoy said in a congressional hearing that Xi is ‘the major decider.’
U.S. special climate envoy John Kerry declined to call Chinese leader Xi Jinping a “dictator” ahead of his expected trip to China for conversations on climate cooperation.
Kerry’s remarks, during a hearing hosted by the House Foreign Affairs Committee today, break with both President Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who used that specific label last month.
During a campaign fundraiser, Biden said that Xi was not aware of the surveillance balloon that China’s military flew over the U.S. in February, adding that, “That was the great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened.”
Calling Xi a dictator is hardly a controversial statement, considering the rapid way in which he has consolidated his power personally over China’s brutal one-party state. But the Biden administration is also engaged in a significant diplomatic effort to seek a détente of sorts with Beijing, which has, until recently, withheld diplomatic dialogue in retaliation for the U.S. handling of the spy-balloon episode. Unsurprisingly, Chinese officials reacted with anger to Biden’s comments, calling them unacceptable.
In a television interview soon after, Blinken, who met with Xi in Beijing just days before Biden’s comments, said that he agrees with the president. But Kerry, who is expected to travel to Beijing for his own meetings with Chinese officials this month, declined to agree with that characterization of Xi’s role.
“There’s no question at all that President Xi is the major decider of the direction and policies,” he said, responding to a question from Representative Darrell Issa (R., Calif.).
Issa then asked, “Is he then effectively a dictator?”
Kerry demurred, saying, “I don’t think it’s useful to get into [that],” he said.
Asked by Issa if he wished that the president had used another word, he said: “All of that is like water off the duck’s back, and I don’t think we ought to get tangled up in labels and names and whatever. What we ought to do is look at the heart of what we’re trying to do.”
He added that Biden “actually has a very good relationship with President Xi.”
Kerry’s diplomatic engagement with China was brought up multiple times during the hearing, with Republican lawmakers expressing criticism of his previous remarks on the Chinese Communist Party’s atrocities against Uyghurs. Among other things, Kerry has previously dismissed the abuses by saying, “That’s not my lane.
Today, however, Kerry claimed, “I’ve raised it in my meetings over the years, raised it consistently over the years as secretary of state, as senator,” after Representative Cory Mills (R., Fla.) cited a 2021 Bloomberg interview in which he downplayed the human-rights concerns because “life is always full of tough choices.”
Kerry also said today that the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act is being enforced and that “there are countless panels not coming into our country” as a result of that enforcement.
The hearing grew testy at multiple points, when lawmakers grilled Kerry on the structure of his office, as well as his use of a private jet. Kerry also defended “shadow diplomacy,” after Representative Michael Waltz (R., Fla.) asked him about his unofficial back-channel talks with the Iranian regime during the Trump administration.