John Kerry refuses to call China's communist leader, Xi Jinping, a "dictator"

President Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry, a former U.S. senator and secretary of state, refused to call Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator” during a Thursday Capitol Hill hearing.

The move got significant attention because it was at odds with President Biden’s recent verbiage, in which he called the Chinese leader a dictator, sparking a visceral reaction from Beijing.

“There’s no question at all that President Xi is the major decider of the direction and of the policies of China,” Kerry, said while testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee’s oversight and responsibility subcommittee.

When pushed by Rep. Darrell Issa if Xi was “in fact, effectively a dictator,” the former 2004 Democratic presidential candidate said that it wouldn’t be “useful” to use such terminology.

“​​He wields enormous power as the leader of China. Absolutely,” Kerry said.

Last month, the president called Xi as a “dictator” who suffered a “great embarrassment” when a Chinese spy balloons hovered over the U.S. earlier this year.

“That’s a great embarrassment for dictators. When they didn’t know what happened. That wasn’t supposed to be going where it was. It was blown off course,” the Biden said at a fundraiser.

When asked by Issa if he thought Biden should have used a different word, the 79-year old climate envoy said he didn’t discuss “labels and names.”

“No, I don’t even – I just, frankly, all of that is like water off the duck’s back and I don’t think we ought to get tangled up in, you know, labels and names and whatever. What we ought to do is look at the heart of what we’re trying to do,” Kerry explained.

Former United Nations ambassador and current Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley called out Kerry for his hesitation to call the Chinese communist leader a “dictator.”

“In my book, wielding unchecked power, imprisoning your opposition, & committing genocide against your own citizens makes you a dictator,” Haley wrote in a tweet Thursday. “But that’s just me.”

Kerry’s testimony before the House committee precedes an upcoming trip to Beijing next week where he will discuss climate change issues with Chinese communist regime officials.

The trip comes after Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited last month, and a week after Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen left the communist state.