Biden tells Chinese students to challenge country’s authority

Tokyo – U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has urged young Chinese students to challenge their government, teachers and religious leaders.

The comments from Biden came as he opened a two-day visit to China on Wednesday.

According to the Japan Times, Biden paid a visit to the U.S. Embassy, where he surprised Chinese citizens waiting to get visitor visas processed.

Biden said that children in America are rewarded, not punished, for challenging the status quo, adding that ‘the only way children can make something totally new is to break the mold of what was old’.

The vice president seemed to be alluding to the authoritarian rule of China’s government, as he described a liberal and permissive intellectual culture in the U.S, the report added.

He also praised China’s educational system, a day after results from a global exam showed U.S. students lagged behind many of their Asian and European peers.

Biden’s visit comes at a tense moment for the U.S. and China, which are at odds over Beijing’s recent insistence that pilots flying through airspace over a set of disputed islands file flight plans with China’s government, the report added.