Snarling diplomacy the wolf warrior amping up Chinas aggro on social media
Once a faceless bureaucrat, foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian is amping up the aggro in diplomatic circles by snarling from his chosen battleground: Twitter.
By Alex W. Palmer
August 14, 2021Zhao Lijian has introduced a new, chaotic tone to Chinese diplomacy, one that appears complementary to the foreign policy of President Xi Jinping.Credit:AFP
Normal text sizeLarger text sizeVery large text sizeOn the morning of Monday, November 30, 2020, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was working from his official residence when an aide alerted him to a tweet by a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman. Morrison was about to finish a two-week quarantine after returning from a brief diplomatic visit to Japan, and had spent most of the morning on the phone with Australian wine exporters, discussing Chinese tariffs that had just taken effect (some as high as 212 per cent) the latest in an escalating string of punitive economic measures imposed on Australia by Beijing.
But the tweet, posted by a diplomat named Zhao Lijian, represented a different kind of aggression. âShocked by murder of Afghan civilians & prisoners by Australian soldiers,â he wrote. âWe strongly condemn such acts, & call for holding them accountable.â Attached was a digital illustration of an Australian soldier restraining an Afghan child with a large Australian flag while preparing to slit the boyâs throat. âDonât be afraid,â the caption read, âwe are coming to bring you peace!â When the tweet appeared online that morning, there were audible gasps in Parliament House.
Earlier that month, the inspector-general of the Australian Defence Force had released the results of a four-year investigation into alleged war crimes committed by elite Australian troops in Afghanistan. The investigation, which described a systemic culture of brutality and lawlessness, implicated 25 soldiers in the unlawful killing of 39 civilians and prisoners, with most of the incidents taking place in 2012. The report dominated news headlines for weeks and sparked a torturous national reckoning. To then see the countryâs most grievous sins â" already documented by its own government â" weaponised in a sarcastic tweet from a foreign official was an almost incomprehensible insult. âI donât think you could imagine a communication that couldâve been more perfectly shaped to be inflammatory in Australia, and so perfectly insensitive,â a former senior Australian government official said.
Zhao Lijian had floated conspiracy theories that the virus originated in the United States.Credit:
Zhao had already made headlines once before, for a tweet in the early days of the pandemic in which he floated a conspiracy theory that the virus originated in the United States. âWhen did patient zero begin in US?â Zhao wrote. âHow many people are infected? What are the names of the hospitals? It might be US army who brought the epidemic to Wuhan. Be transparent! Make public your data! US owe us an explanation!â That time, the US State Department summoned the Chinese ambassador to protest the accusation.
But Zhaoâs Afghanistan broadside was something else entirely. The tweet eclipsed the war-crimes report to become the biggest news in Australia and the turning point of a second national reckoning â" this time on the subject of China. âThere had never been a moment before then where the entire national conversation, from the prime ministerâs courtyard to the suburban barbecue, was about Chinaâs offensive, coercive diplomacy,â the former senior government official said.
AdvertisementLess than two hours after Zhaoâs post, Morrison was on TV delivering a live address from his residence. He denounced the âtruly repugnantâ tweet and asked for an apology from the Chinese government. âThe Chinese government should be totally ashamed of this post,â Morrison said. âIt diminishes them in the worldâs eyes.â
But Morrison also took care to convey that Australia was prepared to talk whenever China was ready. âI would hope that this rather awful event hopefully may lead to the type of reset where this dialogue can be restarted without condition,â Morrison said. The triangulation was an implicit acknowledgment of Australiaâs vexed position â" and of how closely Chinaâs bellicose rhetoric was paired with bruising economic and political pressure.
âI donât think you could imagine a communication that couldâve been more perfectly shaped to be inflammatory in Australia, and so perfectly insensitive.â
At the time of the tweet, Australia was under a series of actual and threatened Chinese trade sanctions targeting roughly a dozen goods, including wine, beef, barley, timber, lobster and coal. The government had limited room to manoeuvre: the Chinese market accounts for 36 per cent of Australiaâs total exports and, according to one estimate, one in 13 Australian jobs.
The tariffs on Australian goods had apparently been imposed in retaliation for Canberraâs recent efforts to counter Chinaâs influence, like barring Huawei from building 5G infrastructure in the country, passing laws against foreign interference in Australian elections and civil society and calling for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus.
Rory Medcalf, head of the National Security College at the Australian National University and author of Indo-Pacific Empire, said Australia was something of a diplomatic proving ground for China: a liberal democracy and American ally that, despite its middle-power status, is stymieing Chinaâs efforts to dominate the region. âChina has been making an example of the country thatâs setting an example for pushing back,â he said.
AdvertisementIt would be tempting to dismiss Zhaoâs tweet as a one-off provocation and Zhao himself as a bit player in this geopolitical drama. But, in fact, his influence has been immense. Despite being almost entirely unknown, even in China, until two years ago, Zhao has managed to rapidly and completely transform how China communicates with its allies and adversaries. His unbridled style of online rhetoric has spread throughout the Chinese diplomatic corps, replacing the turgid mix of evasive diplomatese and abstruse Communist jargon that characterised the nationâs public statements for decades.
At first, Zhao was seemingly on his own, wielding Twitter as his personal cudgel while only a small number of other Chinese diplomats were even on the platform. As his bosses and colleagues in Chinaâs Ministry of Foreign Affairs churned out bland statements about âwin-win co-operationâ and building a âcommunity of shared future for mankindâ, Zhao attacked detractors with an almost savage glee: criticisms of China were âdirty liesâ and a foreign official whom Zhao disagreed with was âa person without soul and nationalityâ.
Zhaoâs timing has proved exquisite. As Chinaâs leader, Xi Jinping, forged a more muscular and confident foreign policy, Zhao was there to introduce a new, chaotic tone into Chinese diplomacy, one that proved perfectly complementary to the presidentâs vision. Online and in the media, Zhao was called the âwolf warriorâ diplomat, a moniker taken from a pair of ultra-nationalistic Chinese action films of the same name.
Zhaoâs recent ascent through the ranks mirrors Chinaâs broader awakening to its own power, a development that has been decades in the making but was rapidly accelerated by the pandemic. Today, with the pandemic continuing and the battle to control what comes next beginning in earnest, a newly wary world is watching as China discovers its voice â" one that sounds a lot like Zhao Lijian.
Chinaâs leader, Xi Jinping, forged a more muscular and confident foreign policy, one being reflected by Zhao Lijian.Credit:Getty Images
In his early career, Zhao â" who did not respond to interview requests for this article â" gave few hints at his future emergence as Chinaâs âwolf warriorâ diplomat. Daniel Markey, the former South Asia head of the US State Departmentâs policy-planning staff, first met him in 2011. In that initial interaction, Zhao was tagging along with a more senior Chinese embassy official. While Markey and the senior official discussed Pakistan and India, Zhao spoke very little, if at all.
AdvertisementâI didnât think much of him,â said Markey, who is now a senior research professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. âHe was just kind of there.â
Zhao joined the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1996 and rose quickly through the ranks, serving at first in the Department of Asian Affairs in Beijing. In 2009, just after then US president Barack Obama began his first term in office, Zhao became first secretary in the political section at the Chinese embassy in Washington â" a plum assignment for a diplomat on the rise.
In Washington, Chinese diplomats had a reputation for being professional, well-prepared and insular. Most lived in the same apartment buildings or in embassy-provided housing, and spent their free time in the Bethesda area north of the city. They kept to themselves and to the local Chinese ethnic community, eating mostly at Chinese restaurants.
American foreign policy hands who interacted with Zhao during this period recall a young diplomat tasked with internal affairs, like preparing reports and briefing superiors. When he did work directly with outsiders, though, Zhao could prove memorable. A business executive who collaborated with Zhao on a number of projects recalled him as âextremely critical, arrogant, unfriendly and just meanâ.
When the executive fell short of Zhaoâs expectations during one such collaboration, the executive was made to endure a criticism session, during which Zhao enumerated all the ways he had been disappointed. âHeâs just simply not a very nice person, period,â the executive said. Even some of Zhaoâs colleagues were said to regard him as prickly, pretentious and unusually nationalistic.
But by the time Zhao returned to Beijing after four years in the US, the shift in the mood and tenor of the bilateral relationship was unmistakable: The Obama administration had announced its âpivotâ to Asia; Xi Jinping was president and Communist Party leader; and a downward spiral was taking hold between the two countries. If Zhao drew any conclusion from his time in Washington, it was very likely the same one dawning on so many others in both capitals: China had arrived and the era of diplomatic quiet and biding their time was over.
In May 2010, he opened an account on Twitter.
AdvertisementZhao arrived in Pakistan five years later, in the northern autumn of 2015, and almost immediately began tweeting in earnest. He had reason to believe that an outspoken Chinese diplomat would be well received in the country. Zhao had served in Pakistan before, in his first foreign assignment with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; it was a posting uniquely favourable to aggressive Chinese diplomacy.
Pakistan was one of the first non-communist countries to switch diplomatic recognition from the exiled government in Taiwan to the Peopleâs Republic of China, in 1950, and it placed a bet on Chinaâs rise well before other regional players. Chinese diplomats refer to Pakistan as their âiron brotherâ and âall-weather friendâ; Pakistani politicians often describe the two countriesâ friendship as âhigher than the Himalayas, deeper than the deepest sea in the world and sweeter than honeyâ.
Zhao had arrived at a moment of deep uncertainty in Pakistan. The first projects of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) were just getting underway. Through CPEC, which began in 2013, China had committed an initial total of about $US46 billion in energy and infrastructure investment, which amounted to roughly 20 per cent of Pakistanâs gross domestic product. The partnership was a cornerstone of Xi Jinpingâs signature foreign policy project, the Belt and Road Initiative, an enormous effort to build infrastructure throughout Asia and beyond in order to strengthen Chinaâs position as the hub of global commerce.
The Pakistani government seemed to be announcing a new batch of Chinese investment every week, but there was no spokesperson responsible for handling CPEC issues, and the messages were sometimes unclear or incomplete; the Chinese embassy, meanwhile, stayed mostly silent.
At the same time, the US, disillusioned and disenchanted after a decade and a half of pouring money, resources and attention into Pakistan with little to show for it, was pulling back its presence. US embassy staff members, once very active in the Pakistani media and on social media, started disengaging. Into that void stepped Zhao, who became the sole voice on all things CPEC, both on Twitter and in more staid official communications. âHe was the face of Chinese diplomacy in Pakistan and Afghanistan,â said Imtiaz Gul, the executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. âHe was in the media far more than the ambassador.â
AdvertisementAt every step, Zhao benefited from the American failure in Pakistan and the lessons it left behind for the next would-be superpower. Zhao won praise for repeatedly highlighting Pakistanâs sacrifices in the âwar on terrorâ, a point that many Pakistanis felt the US had failed to recognise properly. âWe started noticing Beijing pushing that line around 2011, 2012, when things deteriorated with the US,â Wajahat S. Khan, a Pakistani journalist who covered CPEC extensively, said. âAnd this guy just took it to the next level.â
A Twitter presence was part of Zhaoâs diplomatic persona from the beginning of his posting to Pakistan. But as Zhao became more comfortable, his pace, and especially his tone, began to change. In early July 2016, he posted a flurry of provocative tweets. First was a cartoon caricature of President Obama as World War II poster girl Rosie the Riveter, superimposed over a grainy photo of the Capitol Building. âFrom I have a dream to I have drone,â Zhao captioned it. The next day, he posted a cartoon showing an American missile striking a grave labelled âAfghan Peace Talksâ, saying, âPakistan Minister of Interior Nisar: US droned Afghan peace talks to death.â
Zhao also gained fans back home on Chinese social media, where a richer and more nationalistic population was hungry for champions who could translate their countryâs growing power into a forceful global presence. âThe call to be more assertive and to respond to criticism was coming from Chinaâs top leaders,â said Alessandra Cappelletti, who teaches at Xiâan Jiaotong-Liverpool University and has researched Zhaoâs social media activity. But, she added, the real impetus was bottom-up, âa consequence of an increasingly nationalistic society which was starting to feel that Chinaâs voice needed to be heard in a more convincing way in the international arena.â
The international environment had also changed. When Zhao arrived in Pakistan, Donald Trump was still months away from winning the New Hampshire primary. Trumpâs rise through the northern spring of 2016 and his election as US president that November signalled that the old rules were gone. âItâs not a coincidence that Zhaoâs era traces the Trump era pretty closely,â Small said. âIt made things seem possible and acceptable, thanks to the mirroring of the US that goes on in the Chinese side. No one in the Chinese system would have been doing this on social media before Trump.â
âItâs not a coincidence that Zhaoâs era traces the Trump era pretty closely. It made things seem possible and acceptable, thanks to the mirroring of the US that goes on in the Chinese side.â
With his rhetoric towards China in particular, Trump created an opening for an equally forceful response. âIf the US president says China ârapes our countryâ, they have a lot of discursive space,â said Julian Gewirtz, a former senior fellow for China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, an American nonprofit thinktank specialising in US foreign policy.
More broadly, the Chinese leadership may simply be taking a cue from the power that itâs aiming to replace. âPart of it is watching us and learning and modelling themselves on how we behave,â a former US Department of Defence official said. âWeâre pretty aggressive. Are we wolf warriors? Or is that just the way great powers handle themselves?â
The first real test of Chinaâs road to rejuvenation â" and of the wolf warriorsâ ability to help the country get there â" came from Hong Kong and the pro-democracy protests that swept across the city in early 2019. That year, as the protests gained momentum, a new wave of Chinese diplomats joined Zhao on Twitter.
âRight before things kicked off in Hong Kong, there was basically no diplomatic presence for China on Twitter, other than Zhao,â said Bret Schafer, the media and digital-disinformation fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a US national security advocacy group. âNow weâve seen an explosion of accounts come online.â Beijing also began experimenting with covert information operations on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, including creating fake profiles and pages. The response to the Hong Kong protests marked Chinaâs first major foray into so-called âinformation warfareâ on Western social media.
In July 2019, as the protests in Hong Kong raged, Zhao engaged in his most contentious and high-profile dispute yet. After 22 United Nations ambassadors signed an open letter denouncing Chinaâs crackdown on the Uighurs and other Muslim and minority communities, Zhao took to Twitter to criticise American hypocrisy. âIf youâre in Washington, DC, you know the white never go to the SW area, because itâs an area for the black & Latin,â he wrote. âThereâs a saying âblack in & white outâ, which means that as long as a black family enters, white people will quit, & price of the apartment will fall sharply.â
Susan Rice, the former US national security adviser and United Nations ambassador, replied: âYou are a racist disgrace. And shockingly ignorant too. In normal times, you would be PNGed for this,â she tweeted, using slang for âpersona non grataâ â" expulsion from a host country. She called on Cui Tiankai, then serving as Chinaâs ambassador to the US, to âdo the right thing and send him homeâ â" a public communiqué made possible by the fact that Cui had joined Twitter the previous week, part of the crop of new Chinese diplomatic accounts inspired, perhaps, by Zhaoâs runaway success.
The next day, Zhaoâs tweet had been deleted. Still, he wasnât backing down: He soon replaced it with a map highlighting Washingtonâs racial segregation, and he replied to Rice on Twitter. âYou are such a disgrace, too,â he wrote.
âAnd shockingly ignorant, too. I am based in Islamabad. Truth hurts. I am simply telling the truth. I stayed in Washington DC 10 years ago. To label someone who speak the truth that you donât want to hear a racist, is disgraceful & disgusting.â
Two weeks later, Zhao announced on Twitter that he was leaving Pakistan. He did not mention a new posting. It seemed that Zhao had finally gone too far, even by the new standard he helped set.
In fact, Zhao had been given a promotion, to deputy director-general of the information department at the Foreign Ministry â" a posting that often serves as a stepping stone to an even larger role within the diplomatic corps.
According to reporting by Reuters, when Zhao came back to Beijing, he found a group of young staff members gathered outside his office to cheer his return.
Zhao took to his new role with the same gusto he had displayed in Pakistan. On Thanksgiving weekend in 2019, he tweeted about what he was thankful for: the United States, âfor squandering trillions of dollars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syriaâ...â He also suggested that, given its history of racial discrimination, the US should look at itself in the mirror before criticising China over human rights. âBut I suggest youâd better not to do it, in particular before going to bed,â he said. âIt will cause you nightmire [sic].â
Credit:
As the pandemic accelerated beyond Chinaâs borders, Xinhua, the official state news agency, called the outbreak in the US the âTrump pandemicâ and suggested that China could easily withhold exports of medical equipment, without which the US would be engulfed âin the mighty sea of coronavirusâ. When the Netherlands changed the name of its representative office in Taiwan to include the word âTaipeiâ, China warned that it could withhold medical aid in response.
No offender was too small: The Wall Street Journal reported that when a Sri Lankan activist named Chirantha Amerasinghe criticised the Chinese government as âlow classâ on Twitter, the Chinese embassy in Colombo replied, âTotal death in #China #pandemic is 3344 till today, much smaller than your western âhigh classâ governments.â
The campaign was not all punitive, though; it also included incentives for good behaviour. One facet of the response was âmask diplomacyâ: wielding Chinaâs near-monopoly over essential personal protective equipment manufacturing as a tool for rewarding friends and punishing perceived enemies. Huawei, the embattled Chinese telecom giant, donated 800,000 face masks to the Netherlands, a few months before the country was set to hold its 5G telecom auction. More donations went to Canada and France, neither of which had decided on their 5G infrastructure.
According to data from a 14-country survey released by the Pew Research Centre in October, just weeks before Zhaoâs Australia tweet, negative views of China have soared in the past year, hitting historic highs in nine of the 14 countries. The change was especially stark in countries such as Australia, Sweden and the Netherlands, which have been on the receiving end of Chinaâs most bellicose diplomacy.
In Australia, unfavourable views have risen 24 percentage points since 2019, the largest single-year change in the country since Pew began conducting the survey in 2008. Sixty-one per cent of respondents said that China had done a bad job handling the pandemic; the most negative views came from Chinaâs regional neighbours, Australia, Japan and South Korea. (Only the US received a worse grade for its pandemic response.)
Even within China, the new tone has sparked unease, with prominent scholars and former-diplomats pushing back against the hardliners. Zhang Feng, a prominent foreign-policy scholar, published a blog post on Chinaâs âself-defeatingâ discourse. Once too abstract and difficult to understand, Zhang wrote, Chinaâs diplomatic discourse had now swung in the other direction.
âWhy donât we take the high road and compete against the US at the diplomatic level using honest information?â he wrote. âTo flaunt like this, and get into a âspitting warâ with America while dressing it up as âan eye for an eyeâ, is really just playing into Americaâs tactics and in the end hurts Chinese foreign relations and weakens Chinaâs morals internationally.â
Similarly, a Peopleâs Liberation Army general named Dai Xu pointed out that the wolf warriors had failed to win China any friends or goodwill. âChina has provided assistance to so many countries, benefiting them in so many ways, but at this critical moment, none of them has taken any unified action with China,â he wrote. The only thing the wolf warriors had achieved was to âknock on the door of the American Empire with great fanfare and declare, âIâm going to surpass you, Iâm going to replace you and I will become the best in the world.âââ
âEven if [Chinaâs] reputation is damaged, the view of China being powerful and having a louder voice and greater strength is still there.â
But Chinaâs leadership may not care about the countryâs favourability â" at least with certain audiences. The 14 countries measured in the Pew survey are all advanced democracies, many of them in Europe. âThere are other audiences, particularly in parts of the world that donât feel a strong sense of allegiance to the US-led order, where people love this stuff,â Julian Gewirtz said. âTrolls are popular, too.â In the post-Trump era, where trust in long-term US support for developing countries is uncertain, sticking it to Europe and the US may be a winning play, especially as Chinese aid and investment surge and China occupies more of the global leadership role that the West once carved out for itself.
One of the provocative tweets from Zhao Lijian; the response of Chinaâs Ministry of Foreign Affairs was to give him a promotion.
Zhaoâs tweets offer a window into the global audience that China seeks to cultivate. Just before his confrontation with Susan Rice, Zhao promoted a United Nations resolution echoing Chinaâs position on Xinjiang. Among the signatories he highlighted were Russia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Egypt, Algeria, the Philippines and Belarus â" a broad coalition of developing countries, many of which will power future global economic growth and some of which have found themselves on the receiving end of scolding from the US over human rights.
During Mayâs 11-day conflict in Gaza, Zhao tweeted a cartoon image of a bald eagle dropping a missile on the territory. âSee what â#HumanRights defenderâ has brought to #Gaza people,â he wrote. With wolf-warrior diplomacy, China is positioning itself as a leader of the non-Western world, and betting that other members of the bloc are just as eager to see a world free of Americaâs overbearing influence.
In the US and the other rich Western countries included in the Pew survey, meanwhile, the intended message may actually be landing exactly as hoped. âEven if [Chinaâs] reputation is damaged,â Gewirtz said, âthe view of China being powerful and having a louder voice and greater strength is still there.â
Scott Morrison was shocked by this Zhao Lijian tweet, which depicted an Australian soldier about to slit an Afghan boyâs throat.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen; Zhao Lijian/Twitter
Australia may be a harbinger. It remains on the receiving end of a withering campaign of both hard and soft power, ranging from propaganda and threats to broad trade sanctions. âThe Chinese have engaged in economic coercion before against single industries, like Norwegian salmon or Philippine bananas,â James Curran, a professor of history at the University of Sydney, said. âAustralia is taking it across a broad range of fronts simultaneously.â
The country has taken steps, since the passage of the anti-foreign interference laws in 2018, to diversify its economy and reduce dependence on China, but four decades of nearly unquestioned enthusiasm for the fruits of Chinaâs growth have left it in a precarious position. Last year, exports of goods and services to China accounted for 8 per cent of Australiaâs total gross domestic product. Other resource-rich exporters in South America and Africa are similarly exposed, as are Asian economies and emerging markets dependent on China for supply chains, investment and infrastructure. (Australia has been spared the worst of the possible fallout because of record high prices in iron ore, the one commodity for which China is heavily dependent on Australia.)
In Australiaâs case, at least, the point of wolf-warrior diplomacy is, in fact, to be disliked â" or, more precisely, feared. âItâs possible China will have some soft-power setbacks for what theyâre doing,â Rush Doshi, a former Brookings Institution fellow and the author of The Long Game, a book on Chinese grand strategy, said. âBut is soft power going to rule international relations or is hard power?â
In the uproar surrounding Zhaoâs tweet and the Australian reaction, the source of the offending image garnered little attention. It was created by a young graphic artist who goes by the name Wuheqilin. His first illustration, titled A Pretender God, depicted a group of Hong Kong protesters worshipping a grotesque Statue of Liberty, which holds a petrol bomb and a keyboard. His cartoons earned him a glowing profile in Global Times â" a daily tabloid newspaper under the auspices of the Chinese Communist Partyâs flagship Peopleâs Daily newspaper â" as well as the nickname âWolf Warrior artistâ.
Soon after A Pretender God came another piece, Cannon Fodder, which showed a child in a Guy Fawkes mask standing in the middle of a railway track, a slingshot raised at an oncoming train. Beside the tracks stands a group of smiling adults holding umbrellas to shield themselves from the splatter of blood that is sure to result. A woman to the childâs right appears to depict Taiwanâs President Tsai Ing-wen, while a trio of dogs with wagging tongues wear collars resembling the American flag. But perhaps the most interesting symbol is unintentional: the train itself, which appears to stand for China as it hurtles down the tracks â" implacable, unyielding and seemingly unable to change course.
Edited version of a story first published in the New York Times Magazine. © 2021 The New York Times Company.
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