In some of his harshest comments ever made about China, Biden called the country « xenophobic » and said it had more retirees than workers.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday pitched his version of US-China relations to steelworkers in Pennsylvania — that Beijing isn’t only failing to catch up, but struggling on its own.
As he spoke at the US Steelworkers union headquarters in Pittsburgh, the president’s hyperbolic rhetoric sounded almost Trump-esque.
« They’ve got a population that is more people in retirement than working, » Biden said of China. « They’re not importing anything. They’re xenophobic. Nobody else coming in. They’ve got real problems. »
Those were some of the harshest comments Biden has ever made about China, though it’s unclear how the president calculated his retirement figures. China fields a labor force of about 780 million, or more than half its 1.4 billion population, with urban unemployment reportedly at around 5%. But the country is indeed aging rapidly and bound for an imbalanced population, with around 300 million people expected to retire in the next 10 years and fewer births than deaths.
Biden, running for his second term in the White House, has reason to amp up the anti-China talk even as Washington and Beijing try to cool tensions this year.
