RE: ‘Wolf warrior’ diplomats reveal China’s ambitions12 May 2020 13:19
As early as 2009, then vice-president Xi revealed deep-rooted dislike of the west. “Some foreigners who have eaten their fill have nothing better to do than point fingers at us,” he told a Chinese audience in Mexico. “We don’t export revolution, poverty or hunger, and we don’t cause you any trouble, so what is there for you to complain about?” While foreigners dealing with China were used to Chinese officials venting such sentiment in private for many years, that attitude has become more prominent since Mr Xi took power in 2012. He disposed of the foreign policy maxim that China had to hide its strength.
According to Mr Zhao, Washington’s China policy contributed to the change. “From the Obama administration’s ‘rebalance of Asia’, Chinese apprehension that the US has ideological designs on China, that the US does not want to interact peacefully with China strengthened,” he said.
Other Chinese scholars said such concerns gathered pace after the Trump administration started naming China as an adversary in security documents. After international criticism of the country intensified over the Communist party’s re-education camps in Xinjiang and its handling of the Hong Kong protests, the leadership called for a “fighting spirit” across Chinese society. Those instructions were passed on to diplomats by Wang Yi, foreign minister. “The so-called bottom-line thinking towards the west, the conviction that we must fully comprehend the hostility from the US, has now become very dominant, even if this is not expressed frequently in public,” said Mr Zhao.
Although driven chiefly by a sense of great power rivalry with the US, much of the fallout during the coronavirus crisis has been in Europe. “They have started talking to us in a tone that they would have only used towards countries they considered small or weak,” said a German diplomat. Mareike Ohlberg, a scholar at the German Marshall Fund who specialises in Chinese influence campaigns in Europe, said: “In the past, towards us, they had stressed the long-term, the positive, the constructive. It is the first time that we are seeing destructive messaging on a large scale towards Europe,” she said.
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