BEIJING, November 16. /TASS/. The Chinese Foreign Ministry considers US President Joe Biden's remark that Chinese President Xi Jinping is a dictator completely irrelevant.

"This statement was extremely wrong and irresponsible. China firmly opposes political manipulations," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning told a news briefing. "There will always be people with ill thoughts, who may try to provoke the undermining of Sino-US relations," but such attempts "will not succeed."

Earlier, Biden and Xi held a meeting at the Filoli estate in suburban San Francisco, California. After their conversation, Biden was asked at a news conference if he was ready to call the Chinese leader a dictator, the way he did earlier this year. Biden responded: "Look, he is. He's a dictator in the sense that he's a guy who runs a country that is a communist country that's based on a form of government totally different than ours."

The talks near San Francisco were the seventh contact between the two leaders since Biden took office, but only their second face-to-face meeting. It is Xi's first visit to the United States in six years. The previous personal meeting between the two leaders took place on the sidelines of the G20 summit on the Indonesian island of Bali in November 2022.