The scene of Yang Jiechi, the top Chinese diplomat in the U.S.-China dialogue in Alaska, angrily rebuking the U.S. bureaucrats is still fermenting. Some analysts say that this is the “new height” of war-wolf diplomacy, making the double-edged sword of nationalism even hotter; some scholars also analyze that Yang Jiechi’s performance, whose thinking logic is consistent with the thinking logic of the court officials at the end of the Qing Dynasty, will make China fall into the danger of international politics.
The Central News Agency reported that the Vision Foundation held a symposium on “Implications of U.S. Senior Officials’ Asia-Europe Trip: Taiwan’s Perspective” on the 6th, and Ma Zhenkun, director of the Institute of Military Affairs of the Chinese Communist Party at the National Defense University of Taiwan, said that Yang Jiechi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the CPC Central Committee, had a rather high posture during the Alaska talks, and his speech had set off a wave of nationalism and patriotism in mainland China. This trend has also spread to the PLA, which has become more assertive in its air and sea activities around Taiwan.
After Blinken’s meeting with Yang Jiechi and then to Europe, there followed the dispatch or declaration of Britain, France, Germany and other countries to send their naval forces into the South China Sea, the waters around the first island chain, which the Chinese official media and online public opinion called the New Eight-Nation Alliance, which was a warning signal.
Ma Zhenkun believes that at the end of the Qing Empire, the imperial court negotiated many circumlocutions with various countries and powers because it put the face of the ruling authorities above the real national interests, which eventually led to tragedies. He believes that Yang Jiechi’s emphasis on China’s national dignity, saying that the Chinese do not eat this, is consistent with the logic of imperial officials at the end of the Qing Dynasty, and will make China fall into the danger of international politics.
Lv Yue, a veteran media figure, argues in the article “The Difference between ‘Showing Face’ and ‘Showing Eyes'” that both Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi are just the “level-viewing world” in Xi Jinping’s hands during the high-level Sino-US dialogue in Alaska. In the article, Yang Jiechi and Wang Yi are just two “bull knives” in Xi Jinping’s hands to “level the world”. Wang Yi’s performance as a war wolf has long been well known, but Yang Jiechi, who has traveled in the U.S. political circles for nearly 40 years and is good at singing in Wu Nong Shuo, was like a different person in Alaska, staging a fury that even his subordinate Zhao Lijian could not expect. This shows the aggressiveness and expansiveness of Xi Jinping’s new-age thinking, which completely replaces Deng Xiaoping’s judgment of “following the United States will make us rich” with “rising from the east and falling from the west”, and will surely bring instability to the Indo-Pacific and the whole world.
Yin Hong, a professor at the School of International Relations of Renmin University of China and director of the Center for American Studies, warned in an interview with ‘Dovetail’ that the confrontation between China and the United States that the world is currently witnessing, including the conflict between China and the United States and its allies, “is just the beginning. In his view, “China is currently showing a foreign policy face that the West has not seen before, very tough, and it remains to be seen whether this will continue. To a certain extent, if China’s foreign policy is seen by the West to be more moderate in the future than it is now, the confrontation between the U.S., Europe and other alliances with China is not expected to be as serious as it is today.
The scholar seems to euphemistically point out that China’s current confrontation with the West is “so serious” because China’s foreign policy is not “moderate” in the “eyes of the West. This is the tough stance of China’s war-wolf diplomacy as outlined by the outside world for several months.
The scholar at the top mentioned the “face-conscious” thinking of the Qing Empire at the end of its history as the “Heavenly Kingdom”, but perhaps China’s rulers are not convinced. A recent incident in Hong Kong may provide a side reference. According to the World Journal, the new syllabus will be adopted from September this year for secondary school level 2 Chinese history classes in Hong Kong, and the new version of the textbook will remove the background that the Opium War originated from the Qing court’s view of itself as a “heavenly dynasty” and closed its doors. The old textbook mentioned that the Qing court regarded itself as the “Heavenly Kingdom” and regarded foreign trade as a means of “rewarding the far-away people” and other negative expressions were all deleted. The background of the Opium War is directly from the “importation of opium by British merchants.
Chen Renqi, a veteran Chinese history teacher, said that the current curriculum and textbooks have to match the political situation and do not allow many angles of discussion, especially when it comes to nationalist historical events, “the fault must be with the other side, not with oneself”.
Yang Jiechi’s performance is a reflection of Xi Jinping’s “rising from the east and descending from the west”, and “the logic of his thinking is the same as that of the court officials at the end of the Qing Dynasty”. This may not be the concern of the ambitious Xi Jinping.
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