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 cited the United States’ history of black slavery to criticize the United States for being unqualified to point fingers at Xinjiang, while the Global Times, China’s official media, said the criticism of China’s war-wolf diplomacy was “racist. Observers believe that this is a case of the Chinese government “shifting standards and confusing concepts” and shows that Chinese diplomats are in a difficult position and helpless.
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 bumper crops. Forced Labor?” The text implies that the U.S., which has a history of black slavery, is not qualified to criticize China’s Xinjiang issue.
At a regular press conference at the Chinese Foreign Ministry on the same day, Hua Chunying also showed the photo, stressing that “nearly 70 percent of the cotton in Xinjiang has been mechanized for harvesting, and accusations of forced labor in Xinjiang simply do not exist.
The Chinese Embassy in France announced the end of the era of “lamb diplomacy” on the embassy’s official website and Twitter account on March 21. “If there are really ‘war wolves,’ it is because there are too many ‘mad dogs’ and too fierce, including some ‘mad dogs’ cloaked in academic and media trappings against China. The embassy said in an opinion piece.
At 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.
Speaking to the Voice of America, Republican U.S. Senator Rubio said, “Chinese officials usually do that when they meet privately, 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 that we can level the playing field with our opponents. But whether this strategy is good for China is another matter.”
Riding the tiger
The term war-wolf diplomacy surfaced around 2019. At that time, one of the icons of war-wolf diplomacy, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, used Twitter to slam foreign voices critical of China. Since then, other Chinese diplomats have joined the bandwagon and taken an aggressive posture abroad.
According to Zhu Zhiqun, diplomacy actually began to be aggressive, domestically speaking, in 2008, when China successfully hosted the Summer Olympics and in 2010 its GDP surpassed Japan’s, making it 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, China has been criticized by the West for its domestic policies, especially its policies in Xinjiang and Hong Kong, “so Chinese diplomats are riding a tiger. Having to deal with rising nationalist sentiment internally and not showing weakness externally means the situation will be difficult to change in the near future,” Zhu said.
Criticizing War Wolf Diplomacy = Racism?
An opinion piece in the Global Times, the official media of the Communist Party of China (CPC), said in an article on Thursday (March 25) that it is clearly racist for the West to call China’s diplomacy a war-wolf diplomacy. The article quoted Wang Yiming, a professor at Renmin University of China’s School of International Relations, as saying that Western criticism of China’s war-wolf diplomacy is a symbol of white supremacy. “Western countries think they are superior and other countries should be subservient to them.”
In response, Xia Ming, a professor of political science at the City University of New York, argued that the two issues are not at all comparable and that the article aims to attack the United States.
“It’s stealing standards and confusing concepts,” he told Voice of America, “and it’s designed to tell the U.S. that you haven’t dealt with your own problems yet, and we still think you have problems.”
Last year began with the Black Lives Matter movement in American society, while Asians were increasingly discriminated against because of the new crown Epidemic.
Bill Bishop, founder and editor of the e-newsletter Sinocism (Foreigner’s View of China), 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 China’s war-wolf diplomacy continues, this aggressive posture is also causing some trouble for China.
In the last year, China’s relations with major powers have been deteriorating. China’s relationship with the United States has fallen to a 40-year low. Western countries are engaged in a war of words with China over intellectual property theft, the new crown epidemic, the National Security Law in Hong Kong, human rights in Xinjiang, and territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
China’s international image has also been further tarnished by its failure to acknowledge its failures in handling the New Crown epidemic and its economic retaliation against other countries in its overseas propaganda to tell the Chinese story.
A March 16 Gallup poll showed that 45 percent of Americans now view China as the number one enemy of the United States, a figure that has doubled from a year ago.
Around the world, a Pew Research Center poll covering people in 14 developed countries showed that negative perceptions of China are at an all-time high in many countries.
“The effect of war-wolf diplomacy is actually detrimental to China’s strategic space and China’s future development, because war-wolf diplomacy is superimposed on several factors that make the world absolutely distrustful of China,” said Professor Xia Ming of the City University of New York.
Susan Shirk, a professor at the University of California, San Diego and former deputy assistant secretary of state for Asian and Pacific affairs, told the New York Times that Beijing is encouraging diplomats to display a belligerent posture, which makes any negotiations more difficult. But in the long run, China is sowing the seeds of mistrust that will ultimately harm its own interests.
Peter Martin, a former Bloomberg correspondent in China, believes the Global Times article also reveals the frustration and frustration of Chinese diplomats. He quoted an anonymous Chinese diplomat as saying, “We feel it’s unfair that no matter what we do, no matter how we try to improve China’s international image or explain China’s policies, the U.S. and the West will only criticize us.”
Martin said this shows that many Chinese diplomats really believe they are only on the defensive side and are defending their national interests.
Zhu Zhiqun, a professor at Bucknell University, believes there will be debate about this within Chinese diplomats, most notably in the very different reactions last year between ambassador to the United States Cui Tiankai and spokesman Zhao Lijian over claims that the U.S. military brought the New crown outbreak to Wuhan.
At the same time, he shares the view that war-wolf diplomacy is undermining China’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 China’s image abroad has not improved, and that means it is problematic. ”
Recent Comments