China’s war-wolf diplomacy continues to make enemies on all sides of the international stage, with the latest blow coming from Li Yang, the Chinese Consul General in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Li Yang’s recent tweet calling Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “lapdog of the United States” has raised eyebrows in the international diplomatic community.
When a netizen criticized China’s declining diplomatic standards in a Chinese message on Li Yang’s Twitter account, Li Yang called him a “foreign dog” in return. When someone said that the Canadian leadership was correct in its judgment of the Chinese Communist Party, Li Yang asked, “Does Canada have leadership?” Li Yang also responded to a message from netizens, saying that the arrest of huawei Vice Chairman Meng Wanzhou by Canada was a “dirty deed” forced on Canada by the United States.
The former Canadian diplomat in China, Burton, said it was a provocative statement that could have made Canadian authorities classify him as persona non grata and ask him to leave the country if it had been made by a diplomatic official in Canada. Some scholars argue that insulting the leaders of other countries is not the right thing for diplomats to do.
Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of the official media Global Times, said in an article that Li Yang’s language was factual, although it was in a sensitive space of intense controversy, and that the rhetoric of political figures in Western countries also continues to break through the original boundaries, with former U.S. Secretary of State Pompeo and others using more extreme language to describe China.
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