Biden rejects critics who doubt its toughness towards China

May 5, 2019, 00:28 UTC

By Mike Memoli

Joe Biden said on Saturday that China posed a threat to which the United States is well equipped to cope, while he repelled critics of Republicans who viewed it as a way to downplay the power of the Asian nation.

In an interview with WIS-TV, an affiliate member of NBC in South Carolina, the former vice president mocked the suggestion that he did not understand China's economic and military power.

"I never said that China was not a threat, I said we can, if we invest the right way, we can defeat China in any way," Biden said, "I told the Chinese that when they set up these air defense zones, we will not pay attention, we will fly over them … China understands that our problems are negligible compared to what they must face. "

Senator Mitt Romney was among the first Republicans to call Biden for his remarks made during his campaign stops earlier this week in Iowa, in which he said that China "was not a competition for us ".

"It will not age well," Romney tweeted.

President Donald Trump has also described the remarks as "naive" in an interview with Fox News Channel.

"If Biden really said that, it's a very stupid statement," he said.

Mr. Biden played a key role in the Obama administration's relationship with China. He went to this city in 2011 for the first of a series of meetings with Xi Jinping, then vice president of China, in anticipation of his accession to the presidency.

For more than a year, Biden ended his election campaign by talking about a one-on-one dinner with Xi that year, when he explained to the Chinese leader that the America's secret of success was its infinite sense of "opportunity".

Biden said on Saturday that China posed a military threat, which is why it was so important for the United States to maintain its traditional alliances.

"We are breaking NATO and putting our weapons around Putin," he said.

Asked on Friday about Trump's appeal with Russian President Vladimir Putin about Trump's call, Biden replied, "Who knows what he said."