Washington: United States President Joe Biden on Thursday described China as a “ticking time bomb,” pointing to the country’s underlying economic challenges, The Hill reported.

He was speaking to supporters at a fundraiser in Utah, where he suggested that China was in trouble because of slowing growth and a high unemployment rate.

“China is a ticking time bomb in many cases,” Biden said.

“They’ve got some problems,” he added. “That’s not good because when bad folks have problems, they do bad things,” The Hill quoted Biden as saying.

Notably, the President’s comments risk exacerbating tensions with Beijing at a time when the relationship between the two countries is already tense, though US officials have conducted outreach events in recent weeks.

Earlier this week, the Biden administration issued an executive order restricting certain US investments in Chinese technology sectors, citing the risk that those investments could be used to help Beijing’s military and intelligence programs.

The order will ban venture capital and private equity firms from investing money into Chinese efforts to make semiconductors and other microelectronics, quantum computers and certain artificial intelligence applications, according to the report. Administration officials said that the decision was taken to protect national security, according to The New York Times report.

The US Treasury Department, in a statement, said, "The Biden administration is committed to keeping America safe and defending America’s national security through appropriately protecting technologies that are critical to the next generation of military innovation."

Meanwhile, Thursday was not the first time Biden spoke more openly than usual about China at a political fundraiser.

During a July swing through California, Biden said at a fundraiser that Chinese President Xi Jinping was a “dictator” who got upset when a Chinese spy balloon was shot down off the coast of the US earlier in the year, as per The Hill.

“That was the great embarrassment for dictators, when they didn’t know what happened,” Biden said at the time.