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Letters | Why Xi wouldn’t have told Biden ‘autocracies will run the world’
- US President Joe Biden’s account of his phone call with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, in which Xi was said to have praised autocracy, may contain a mistranslation
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In his speech to the US Naval Academy’s graduating class on May 27, President Joe Biden revealed some chilling details about his phone call with Chinese President Xi Jinping the night he was elected president.
“We’re living through a global struggle between autocracies and democracies,” Biden said in his speech. “I’ve met more with Xi Jinping than any other world leader has. When he called me to congratulate me on election night, he said to me what he said many times before.”
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The president then quoted Xi as saying: “Democracies cannot be sustained in the 21st century. Autocracies will run the world. Why? Things are changing so rapidly. Democracies require a consensus, and it takes time, and you don’t have the time.”
Xi is wrong, Biden said.
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If Biden’s quotation of Xi is correct, Xi’s views on autocracies are not only worrying for democracies around the world, but also at odds with the Chinese leadership’s own official doctrine.
In 2012 the Chinese Communist Party endorsed a set of 12 core socialist values as the party’s interpretation of Chinese socialism. Notably, “democracy” is one of these core values. Xi has since repeatedly noted these values in his speeches.
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