Wolf Warrior post mocking India’s virus woes erased
‘China’s fire vs India’s fire’ image drew backlash though some say China should be ‘muscular’
One side of the image was of a Chinese rocket launch. The other was a photo of funeral pyres for coronavirus victims in India. Over the top was the title: “China’s fire vs India’s fire”.
The image was posted on Changan Jian, a social media account linked to the Communist Party, last Saturday.
The attempt to contrast the success of China’s latest space mission with the humanitarian tragedy across the border in India backfired and was swiftly taken down after criticism at home and abroad for its lack of compassion for people trapped in the trauma of the coronavirus pandemic.
The image is part of a nationalistic approach to China’s presentation of its views abroad that is sometimes referred to as Wolf Warrior diplomacy, and similar outcries over similar offending posts have been stirred up in Australia and Japan.
Some topics can never be joked about, including … disease, pain, life and death
REN YI
Even though the Changan Jian post was deleted, it revived a debate over how China should show itself to the rest of the world, with some suggesting that Beijing has not been muscular enough in taking on Western narratives.
One of the most divisive figures on China’s diplomatic front lines has been foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian.
Last month, Zhao posted a variation on Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” on Twitter. The image based on the Japanese print showed nuclear waste being poured into a sea of deformed children. The image prompted a protest from Tokyo but Zhao responded by pinning the post to the top of his page.
The foreign ministry spokesman was also at the centre of controversy last year when he posted a graphic illustration of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of an Afghan child. The drawing was the work of Chinese political cartoonist Wuheqilin and again Zhao refused to take the offending post down.
Some have called for China to encourage grass-roots forces like Wuheqilin to take on Western perspectives. In the March edition of Military Reporters magazine, a monthly publication by the military’s news agency, two researchers from the People’s Liberation
Army’s news centre said images could overcome cultural and language barriers between Chinese and Western internet users.
“In the future, China should cultivate and support this new generation of non-governmental forces such as Wuheqilin, so that they can become a new force in spreading Chinese culture, telling Chinese stories, and countering international narratives,” the researchers, Zhou Jie and Li Bo, said.
It is a view supported by Shen Yi, an international relations professor from Fudan University in Shanghai.
On the microblogging website Weibo, Shen said China would come in for criticism no matter what it posted.
“Honestly, it’s overly idealistic to think that a post in Weibo can help China stand on the moral high ground, especially when China is confronted with a narrative crisis overseas … We should not limit ourselves,” he said.
He said China needed to be an “800-pound gorilla” that could “lead the world gently to build a shared destiny for mankind”.
Not everyone was convinced. Hu Xijin, editor-in-chief of state tabloid Global Times, said official accounts like Changan Jian – which belongs to the party’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission – should “show sympathy towards the Indians”.
Ren Yi, a princeling with more than 1.7 million followers on Weibo, also said the social media post was not appropriate.
“China is a vast country where there are all kinds of opinions, from realist to cynical,” Ren said. “However, some topics can never be joked about, including disasters, disease, pain, life and death.”
Florian Schneider, director of the Leiden Asia Centre in the Netherlands, said the debate over China’s handling of these issues was linked to whether people thought they needed to make friends in the global community.
“There is a lot of anxiety about China’s role in the world today, both outside and inside [China], and when discussions turn to this contested issues, we see tempers boiling over in ways that are often decidedly undiplomatic,” he said.
Another factor might be the pandemic, which had interrupted normal in-person communication and led to distrust, said Wu Fei, professor of journalism and communication at Jinan University in Guangzhou.
Whatever the causes, the results might not serve Beijing’s interests, observers said.
“This approach is counterproductive to serving Beijing’s foreign interests … This kind of Wolf Warrior style alienates foreign governments and citizens and seems to be linked with foreigners’ reduced trust in the Chinese government,” said Jonathan Hassid, an associate professor at Iowa State University studying Chinese news media.