Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, is one of the leading figures in the Communist Party’s war-wolf diplomacy.
In the past few days, Beijing has once again used “War Wolf diplomacy” to confront governments and businesses on human rights issues in Xinjiang. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying has implicitly criticized the U.S. for not being in a position to blame Xinjiang for its black slavery history, while the Global Times, the official media of the Communist Party of China (CPC), has said that criticism of the CPC’s war-wolf diplomacy is “racist. Observers believe that this is a “shift in standards and confusion of concepts” by the Chinese government, and also shows that Chinese diplomats are having a hard Time riding the tiger.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying tweeted on March 25, comparing a photo of black laborers and farmers in a Mississippi cotton field in 1908 with a photo of cotton farmers in Xinjiang in 2015, with the caption “Long guns and hounds vs. smiles and a good harvest. Forced Labor?” The text implies that the U.S., which has a history of black slavery, is not qualified to criticize the Chinese Communist Party on Xinjiang.
At a regular press conference of the Chinese Foreign Ministry on the same day, Hua Chunying also showed photos and stressed that “nearly 70 percent of cotton in Xinjiang has been mechanized, and accusations of forced labor in Xinjiang simply do not exist.
On March 21, the Chinese Embassy in France announced on its official website and Twitter account that the era of “lamb diplomacy” was over. “If there are ‘war wolves’, it is because there are too many ‘mad dogs’, including some ‘mad dogs’ in academic and media garb, who are tearing at the CCP,” the embassy said. The embassy said in an opinion piece.
During the U.S.-China High-Level Dialogue in Alaska last week, Chinese representative Yang Jiechi responded to U.S. Secretary of State Blinken’s criticism on Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong by throwing a sharp line in front of the media, such as “the Chinese don’t eat this” and “the U.S. is not qualified to speak to China from a high position. ” and so on, let the outside world side eye.
Republican U.S. Senator Rubio told the Voice of America, “Chinese Communist Party officials usually do that in private meetings, and this is probably the first time I’ve seen that kind of attitude in a public meeting. I think it’s a behavior that is rewarded within the Chinese Communist Party, and you see that in their war-wolf diplomacy, stupidity (silliness).”
“I think war-wolf diplomacy will become a mainstream form of diplomacy,” Zhu Zhiqun, a professor of political science and international relations at Bucknell University (USA), told Voice of America, “because the top leaders have said we can level the playing field with our opponents. But whether this strategy is good for the CCP is another matter.”
Riding the Tiger
The term war-wolf diplomacy surfaced around 2019. At that time, one of the representatives of war-wolf diplomacy, CCP Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, used Twitter to slam foreign voices critical of the CCP. Since then, other CCP diplomats have joined the bandwagon and taken an aggressive posture abroad.
According to Zhu Zhiqun, diplomacy actually began to be aggressive from within China in 2008, when the country successfully hosted the Summer Olympics and in 2010 its GDP surpassed Japan’s to become the world’s second-largest economy.
“And in recent years, there has been talk from above of having a fighting spirit and telling a good Chinese story. That has encouraged diplomats, or foreign ministry spokespeople, to take a tougher stance,” he said.
And in the external environment, the Communist Party has been criticized by Western countries for its domestic policies, especially its policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, “so Communist diplomats are riding a tiger. Having to deal with rising nationalist sentiment internally and not showing weakness externally means this situation will hardly be changed in the near future,” Zhu said.
Criticism of war-wolf diplomacy = racism?
An opinion piece in the Global Times, the official media of the Communist Party of China (CPC), on Thursday (March 25) said that the West’s reference to Chinese Communist diplomacy as war-wolf diplomacy is clearly racist. The article quoted Wang Yiming, a professor at Renmin University of China’s School of International Relations, as saying that the West criticizes the CCP’s war-wolf diplomacy as a symbol of white supremacy. “Western countries think they are superior and other countries should be subservient to them.”
Last year began with a movement in American society that black lives are also lives, while Asians have been increasingly discriminated against because of the Communist virus Epidemic.
Bill Bishop, founder and editor of the e-newsletter Sinocism, said the Global Times is increasingly defining things as a race and civilization contest. “I see this as a manifestation of Xi Jinping‘s diplomatic ideology of war wolves,” he writes.
Isolated war wolves
As the cumulative effect of the CCP’s war-wolf diplomacy continues, this aggressive posture is also causing the CCP some trouble.
In the last year, the CCP’s relations with major powers have been deteriorating. The CCP’s relationship with the United States has fallen to a 40-year low. Western countries are engaged in a war of words with the CCP over intellectual property theft, the CCP epidemic, the National Security Law in Hong Kong, human rights in Xinjiang, and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
In terms of overseas propaganda to tell the Chinese story, the CCP’s failure to admit that it has made mistakes in handling the CCP virus epidemic and imposing economic retaliation on other countries has further damaged the CCP’s international image.
A March 16 Gallup poll showed that 45 percent of Americans now view the CCP as the number one enemy of the United States, and that number has doubled from a year ago.
Around the world, a Pew Research Center poll covering people in 14 developed countries showed that negative views of the Communist Party in many countries are at an all-time high.
Susan Shirk, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and former deputy assistant secretary of state for Asia-Pacific affairs, told the New York Times that Beijing is encouraging diplomats to be belligerent, which makes any negotiations more difficult. But in the long run, the Chinese Communist Party is sowing the seeds of distrust that will ultimately harm its own interests.
Professor Zhu Zhiqun of Bucknell University believes there will be debate about this within the CCP diplomats, most notably in the very different reactions of Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai and spokesman Zhao Lijian last year to the claim that the U.S. military brought the CCP virus outbreak to Wuhan.
At the same time, he shares the view that war-wolf diplomacy is undermining the CCP’s own national interests.
“Because the purpose of diplomacy is to make more friends, and if the result of diplomacy results in making a lot of enemies, then no matter what way it is, then you have a failure in that diplomacy,” he told VOA, “and what has happened recently is that the CCP’s image overseas has not improved, and that means it is problematic. ”
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