When I walked into the office of Mr. Zhang Tai Nian, Consul General of France in Guangzhou, one day in early 2011, he was still angry about a phone call he had just received.
Mr. Zhang and his colleagues had been preparing for a long Time for a routine annual Sino-French cultural exchange event in Shenzhen, having already self-censored the politically sensitive issues and chosen language learning as the theme. The Chinese side also cooperated throughout, until the day before the event opened, the day of our meeting, Mr. Zhang received a phone call from a section chief of the cultural department in Shenzhen – diplomacy is about reciprocity of rank, which is just as well – and the other side asked to stop the event. Mr. Zhang argued that it was just language learning …… the other side did not wait for him to finish, said there was no room for negotiation, and then hung up the phone. Mr. Zhang felt very shocked. As a diplomat, he had rarely encountered such rude and impolite treatment.
Immediately afterwards I went to Paris to attend a conference. Diplomats from France and Germany spoke of “rude diplomacy” in China. A French media colleague told me that he even wrote an article about it.
It was not until five years later that the new term “war-wolf diplomacy” became popular. Many people therefore see it as a diplomatic turn in the Xi Jinping era. As I have repeatedly pointed out in my commentaries, the shift in China’s image, including Wolf Diplomacy, comes more from the evolution of the CCP’s power structure, in which the personal style of the leader plays only a partial role. Before “rude diplomacy,” there was already talk of China’s “arrogant diplomacy.
After 1949, Zhou Enlai led a foreign policy that attempted to behave like a “great power diplomacy” in isolation, with a special emphasis on protocol. Legend has it that Zhou Enlai organized his diplomats to hide behind a screen to learn the ritual of presenting gifts to Mao Zedong from visiting guests. As a result, he left behind the famous dictum that “diplomacy is no trivial matter, do not take it lightly.
This tradition was maintained until the Jiang Zemin era. The ruler, who had lost his ideological legitimacy, began to tear off his skin internally and to maintain stability with blatant violence, while still trying to look like a gentleman with good manners externally, although from time to time it became a laughing stock. At that time, China needed international permission to join the globalized economy and trade, and the buzzword was “to be in line with the world.
Zhao Lijian can also become polite and refined
In the Hu-Wen era, the Chinese model was deliberately shaped by the government, and the “rise of a great power” brought about a vulgar nationalist sentiment, which led to a change in the diplomatic field that surprised the world. Diplomats disregarded etiquette, spoke and acted abruptly, and foreign ministry press conferences became stages for displays of rudeness.
After Xi Jinping came to power, “aligning with the world” faded away and was replaced by “showing the way for the world” – according to media statistics, in 2020 alone, the Chinese official media used the phrase According to media statistics, in 2020 alone, Chinese official media reported “Xi Jinping shows the way for the world” as a headline at least 12 times.
The premise of “showing the world the way” is the “four self-confidences”, which Hu Jintao, then general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), put forward in his report to the 18th CPC National Congress in November 2012, namely the “three self-confidences”, namely “In July 2016, at the conference celebrating the 95th anniversary of the founding of the CPC, Xi Jinping added “cultural self-confidence” to form the “Four Confidence “. Here we can also see that Xi Jinping is not an alien from heaven, but the natural successor of the Chinese regime.
No matter how confident, Western society cannot accept an authoritarian party that has left a record of countless human rights disasters in its history to show the world the way, so war-wolf diplomacy becomes a gesture that is considered effective.
I still remember asking Mr. Zhang Tanian what to do, and Mr. Zhang shook his head and said with both hands, “There is nothing we can do!” This is also a common response to “arrogant diplomacy”. To the Chinese side, this meant that it was effective. As a result, ceremonial diplomacy has gradually transitioned to arrogant diplomacy, rude diplomacy and war-wolf diplomacy.
The current Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian played the role of the War Wolf, not only by making the baseless claim that the new crown virus came from the United States, but also by addressing the foreign minister of the Five Eyes Alliance, saying, “Whether they have five eyes or ten, if they dare to damage China’s sovereignty, they will be blinded. These words, which in the past might have been considered undignified, may now be rewarded.
Some netizens think that the Foreign Ministry spokesman’s “thunderous” words are due to his low personal quality; some scholars think that the war-wolf diplomacy comes from Xi Jinping’s tough personality; and others think that the propaganda machine has become stupid. In fact, these judgments are not accurate enough. They do so because it is profitable. Otherwise, Zhao Lijian could have become civilized in just one night.
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