Are Chinas wolf warriors gone?
Comment  At the beginning of June, Chinese leader Xi Jinping caused a sensation by urging the authorities to create a kinder China (). As the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported, the country needs to make many friends, unite the majority, and continually expand its circle of friends with those who understand and are friendly with China. Since Chinese diplomacy in recent years has been decidedly non-diplomatic, foreign media have speculated that this heralds a change in policy. The term wolf warrior, derived from two chauvinistic films, Wolf Warrior and Wolf Warrior Two, in which Chinese special forces agents fight on behalf of oppressed worlds, has been a huge hit in China, but not elsewhere. . While the films have beaten the box office in China, foreign critics have not been so kind, with a see again believing that Wolf Warrior Twos sheer moral ineptitude, combined with its B-movie tone, makes it one of the unintentionally most hilarious films of the year. As admirable as the bellicose behavior of soldiers on a mission to aid oppressed humanity may be, they had not won many friends in China when practiced by the countrys diplomats. Although there are many previous cases of rude Chinese diplomats, the opening salvo of the current era occurred in June 2010 when then Foreign Minister and now State Councilor Yang Jiechi s is angry informed ASEAN that China is a big country and you are small countries and that is a fact. A succession of other incidents followed in language that resembled more the trashy discourse of wrestling matches than the traditional diplomatic discourse. No region of the world has been spared. When a Canadian journalist asked his countrys foreign minister about Chinas detention of Canadian citizens, Wang Yi, Yang Jiechis successor as Chinas foreign minister, broke into what the New York Times called a shabby conference delivered with an opera in which he called the journalist arrogant and prejudiced. Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of the president of Brazil and himself a congressman, has been blasted for mentioning Chinese espionage. A screenshot from Hu Xijins YouTube channel. Xijin, editor of the Chinese state tabloid Global Times, speaks about a Sino-Taiwanese war in Beijing, China, September 25, 2020 (Screenshot via The Epoch Times)  After the Australian government called for an independent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, Hu Xijin, editor of the Beijings Global Times, commented that Australia is a bit like chewing gum glued on the sole of the shoes from China. Sometimes you have to find a stone to erase. In Sweden, internationally regarded as a neutral observer of world affairs whose citizens are slow to get angry, Ambassador Gui Congyou has become the star child of the Wolf Warrior. He and his team have so regularly disparaged the countrys media and officials that he has been summoned by the Swedish Foreign Ministry more than 40 times in two years. In a phrase that quickly became as infamous as Yang Jiechis China-is-big-you-are-small, Gui declared, We [China] treat our friends with good wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns. Asked later about the comment, Gui Note that despite its rhetoric about shotguns, Sweden is not big enough to be threatening.  After Five Eyes, an intelligence-sharing group comprising Australia, Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the United States, criticized the arrest of democracy advocates in Hong Kong, an official of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned whether they have five or ten eyes, they should be careful not to have their eyes gouged out and characterize the group as a coalition of Anglo-Saxon white supremacists. Warnings that the wolf warriors tactics were backfiring on the formation of a coalition hostile to China seemed to push them to escalate. In March, Li Yang, Chinese Consul General in Riode Janeiro,referred to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as a boy whose greatest achievement is to have ruined the friendly relations between China and Canada and to have made Canada a hound of the United States. The Chinese Embassy in France replied to complaints by saying: If there is a Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, its because there are too many rabid dogs. Some want Chinese diplomacy to be lamb diplomacy, more tolerant and calmer towards external attacks. Those days are over. In April, Australia was back in the news with General Jin Yinan saying that the country was neither strong nor powerful; we dont need to take him seriously, adding that white supremacy was a key motivator in his actions. In May, a cartoon tweeted by the Chinese Embassy in Japan showing the grim reaper with the Israeli flag on his scythe was all the rage. After protests from the Israeli embassy, the tweet was deleted, but the embassy offered no apology. The hope that Xi Jinpings exhortation to make China kinder does not come with a softening of the rhetoric. On the contrary, Frances Lu Shayes outspoken ambassador described himself as wearing the epithet proudly and sworn to stand firm against the mad dogs attacking China. There was also no suspension of belligerent activity. China stepped up forays into Southeast Asia, sparking protests in Malaysia in June as the countrys air force scrambled jet planes to intercept Chinese planes entering its national airspace. The Philippines has complained about the presence of Chinese Coast Guard vessels in the Philippine Exclusive Economic Zone, with China responding that the area falls within the 9-dash line it claims in the South China Sea claiming that the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled invalid. This infuriated the Philippine Minister of Foreign Affairs, Teodoro (Teddy) Locsin Jr., so much that he sent a Tweeter call china a naughty idiot and tell it to pull out the fk. Scolded by its president for using language only the president himself could use, Locsin later apologized for the choice of words, but not the substance of his remarks. According to the Japanese Ministry of Defense, in early June, the Chinese Coast Guard ships have been seen in adjoining areas of Japan for a record 112 days so far this year. Mid-June, 28 Chinese Air Force planes Between Taiwans air defense identification zone broke the previous record of 25 just two months earlier. Separately, Chinese ground troops and the Navy organized a series of exercises featuring amphibious landing craft and vehicles. Philippine Coast Guard personnel inspect several ships suspected of being Chinese militia ships at Sabina Shoal in the South China Sea, in a photo distributed by the Philippine Coast Guard on May 5 and taken according to a source on the 27th. April 2021. (Philippine Coast Guard / Document via Reuters)  Beijing has responded to any criticism with sharp rhetorical claims that China is intimidated by other states and that it will defend its principled claims to the end accompanied by increased military pressure and economic coercion. These are sometimes lifted by remonstrances to the need to find ways of getting along that are not accompanied by conciliatory words or acts that might provide grounds for diluting what has become a toxic mixture. At least so far, the Wolf Warriors seem to be successful. Hard rhetoric is popular nationally, and countries that should form a coalition to counter Chinese aggression have so far proven unable to do so. Some emerging efforts can be observed: the Blue Point Network of Australia, Japan and the United States aims to provide an alternative to Chinas transnational infrastructure, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); the European Parliament has suspended the ratification of the Global Investment Agreement (CAI) which seemed almost acquired; and the World Bank has decreases to award the contract for a transpacific cable to a Chinese company, but these steps may be too short and too late. On closer analysis of Xi Jinpings words, the image of a more lovable China that he put forward did not involve acts of kindness but was in fact a warning to his public relations, aka his propaganda apparatus. , to better tell the story of China. In other words, there should be more stories of Tibetans singing and dancing in order to counter the foreign accounts of Tibetan Buddhists self-immolating themselves in protest against religious oppression; photographs of rosy-cheeked Uyghur girls harvesting bountiful crops rather than Western videotapes of gaunt residents who live in high-walled prisons; and residents of Hong Kong praising the stability the Chinese Communist Party has brought to their city rather than videos of police beating pro-democracy dissidents and a prominent newspaper editor taken in handcuffs. So far, the momentum seems to be with China. June Teufel Dreyer is Professor of Political Science at the University of Miami, Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Educational Advisor at the Rumsfeld Foundation, and former Commissioner of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Dr Dreyer is the author of several books on Chinese ethnic minorities, the Chinese political system, China-Taiwan relations and Sino-Japanese relations. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Epoch Times.