U.S. President Joe Biden said on Tuesday that China will pay a price for its human rights abuses, adding he raised the issue with President Xi Jinping in a phone call last week.
“There will be repercussions for China,” Biden said during a televised town hall on CNN.
Biden and Xi spoke by telephone last Thursday before the Lunar New Year holiday.
The United States will reassert its global role in speaking up for human rights, Biden said, adding that he would work with the international community to get China to protect them.
“China is trying very hard to become a world leader and to get that moniker and be able to do that they have to gain the confidence of other countries,” Biden said on his first official trip since taking office as president in January.
“As long as they are engaged in activity that is contrary to basic human rights, it is going to be hard for them to do that,” he added.
On February 10, the White House said Biden underscored his fundamental concerns about Beijing’s coercive and unfair economic practices, crackdown in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and increasingly assertive actions in the region, including toward Taiwan.-Reuters
