Republican presidential hopeful Carly Fiorina skipped diplomatic protocol by bluntly calling the Chinese "not terribly imaginative" prior to announcing her 2016 presidential bid, Bloomberg reported. 

The former Hewlett-Packard chief made the comment in a discussion on the Common Core educational benchmarks filmed by the Iowa political blog Caffeinated Thoughts.

"The argument for Common Core is frequently, 'Oh, we've got to compete with the Chinese,'" Fiorina noted.

"I've been doing business with the Chinese for decades, and I will tell you that, yeah, the Chinese can take a test; but what they can't do is innovate," she added.

The candidate, who in 2009 failed in her attempt to unseat California Sen. Barbara Boxer, went on to link her assessments to copyright and trademark issues, which have long been points of contention between Washington and Beijing.

"(The Chinese are) not entrepreneurial," she contended. "They don't innovate -- that's why they're stealing our intellectual property," Fiorina quipped.

In her book, "Rising to the Challenge: My Leadership Journey," the former executive had already leveled criticism at China's educational model, which she deemed "too homogenized and controlled to encourage imagination and risk taking," according to Time magazine.

It's a point she underlined in her conversation with Caffeinated Thoughts: American schools should draw a contrast to those in the People's Republic by championing an approach that inspires creativity, Fiorina suggested, according to Bloomberg.

"One of the things we have to maintain about our school system, which comes with local control, is to teach entrepreneurship, innovation, risk taking, imagination," she argued.

"These are things that are distinctly American, and we can't lose them," Fiorina added.

The 60-year-old kicked off her presidential campaign in early May with a conference call, television interview and online town hall -- events she used to tout her business experience and criticize Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, USA Today recalled.

"I think I'm the best person for the job because I understand how the economy actually works," she had told ABC's Good Morning America. "I understand the world, who's in it, how the world works."