Video shows the moment Antony Blinken winces after Biden calls China's Xi a dictator, upending months of careful diplomacy

• President Joe Biden and China's Xi Jinping sought to smooth relations at a meeting Wednesday.
• Yet hours after the carefully choreographed event, Biden described Xi as a "dictator."
• Secretary of State Antony Blinken's reaction told its own story.

A video has captured the moment US Secretary of State Antony Blinken winces after President Biden calls Chinese leader Xi Jinping a "dictator".

During a press conference in the wake of a meeting designed to smooth frayed US-China relations, Biden was asked whether he stood by remarks in June in which he described Xi as a "dictator."

"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," Biden said.

Biden's remarks came just hours after he met with Xi at the sidelines of the APEC summit in San Francisco in the first face-to-face meeting between the pair in a year.

Blinken appeared to be taken aback, having laid the groundwork for Wednesday's meeting with months of careful diplomacy.

"Twelve months of hard work & diplomacy thrown in the toilet with a simple word," said former Italian diplomat Marco Carnelos on X of Blinken's body language.

US-Chinese diplomatic relations are founded on the US acknowledging the "One China" policy, under which the Chinese Communist Party is the legitimate ruler of the country, and their claims to own the independent island of Taiwan are acknowledged but not backed.

Biden has in the past swerved from that policy, saying a number of times that the US would defend Taiwan if it was attacked by China, prompting a U-turn from the White House.

China responded with fury to Biden's remarks Wednesday.

"This statement is extremely wrong and irresponsible political manipulation," foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters on Thursday at a routine briefing, Reuters reported.