Beijing’s wolf warriors
Last month, Australia called for an international inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus outbreak, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. “Not unreasonable, you might think.” The virus was “made in China”. And now that it has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and hobbled the global economy, the world would like to know how it happened. But Cheng Jingye, China’s ambassador to Canberra, responded by igniting a diplomatic firestorm. If Australia pushed for an inquiry, he warned, Chinese tourists might “have second thoughts” about going there. Chinese students might start to wonder whether it was “not so friendly, even hostile”. And “maybe the ordinary people will say, why should we drink Australian wine or eat Australian beef”. In the past, Chinese diplomats have been colourless figures, said Gordon Watts in Asia Times. But around the world a new breed of envoys – known as “wolf warriors”, after an action film – are lashing out at any perceived criticism of China.
The wolf warriors’ figurehead is Zhao Lijian, the 47-year-old foreign ministry spokesman, said Philip Sherwell in The Sunday Times. Zhao is a combative nationalist known for his fierce Twitter rhetoric, and for pushing the conspiracy theory that the virus was brought to Wuhan by US soldiers participating in the World Military Games. Following his lead, Chinese diplomats across Europe have condemned their host countries’ response to the virus; allegations that Chinese missions were spreading disinformation and fake news led to a showdown with the EU in Brussels. If Beijing’s strategy is “to win friends and influence people overseas”, then its approach is clearly failing. But the main audience for Beijing’s foreign policy is a domestic one; its aim is to ensure that the Chinese public rally around the Communist Party and its leader, Xi Jinping.
Is it any wonder, though, that China is on the defensive, asked Patrick Cockburn in The Independent. President Trump is intent on “demonising China” – claiming that the virus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, though his own intelligence services reject the theory ( see page 8). It’s a crude, mendacious attempt to distract attention from his own “calamitous mishandling of the pandemic”. Trump may yet turn out to be “Beijing’s best friend”, said Alex Lo in the South China Morning Post. A fair inquiry into the pandemic would likely be deeply damaging to China. But the wild allegations from Washington give Beijing the perfect excuse to reject any inquiry as a “political ploy” designed to scapegoat the Chinese. Before the pandemic, there was a “strong case for the West to toughen its line with China”, said Gideon Rachman in the FT – over its treatment of Hong Kong, for instance, and its theft of foreign intellectual property. But the clear risk now is that “a reasoned and principled reset of relations with China” will slide into something far “more dangerous”.