President Joe Biden and China’s Xi Jinping held a tightly-scripted diplomatic encounter Wednesday on the sidelines of a Pacific states summit aimed at calming fears over the U.S. and China drifting toward military conflict in the Indo-Pacific.

Then, in the waning moments of his remarks to the press following the meeting, Biden stood by his prior assessment that Xi is a dictator.

“Look, he is. He’s a dictator in the sense that he’s a guy who runs a country that is a communist country,” Biden said during a news conference following his four-hour session with Xi.

[This is pretty awkward given that this was supposed to be a kind of goodwill summit aimed at restoring relations, but he’s not wrong. Xi Jinping is a communist dictator in a one party state. – John]