China has transferred a senior diplomat closely associated with the foreign ministry’s more confrontational shift in the past few years to a new role, in the latest sign that Beijing is rethinking its so-called “wolf warrior” approach.
Former Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Zhao Lijian (趙立堅), 50, has been named deputy director of the Department of Boundary and Ocean Affairs, the ministry disclosed on its Web site on Monday.
While technically a lateral move, the new post is far less prominent than the spokesperson’s podium, where Zhao had since February 2020 become one of China’s most prominent public officials, with almost 8 million followers on the Sina Weibo social media platform.
Photo: Reuters
The move came less than two weeks after former China’s former ambassador to the US, Qin Gang (秦剛) — a one-time foreign ministry spokesman — was named minister of foreign affairs.
Qin, 56, has demonstrated a more traditional, less social-media-driven approach and signaled a desire to mend ties with nations such as the US and Australia, some of the most prominent targets of Zhao’s criticism.
The personnel shifts coincide with a push by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to re-engage the US and its allies, holding his first in-person summit with US President Joe Biden in Bali, Indonesia, in November last year.
Xi has sought to improve relations with leaders of top US allies, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.
Speaking yesterday at a regular news briefing in Beijing, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman Wang Wenbin (汪文斌) said that “comrade Zhao Lijian has moved to a new position according to the needs of our work.”
The Asian nation’s diplomatic approach “upholds world peace and promotes common development,” Wang said, adding that it was “unequivocal and firm” on issues that touched on issues such as sovereignty.
Zhao rose to prominence with an unusually combative Twitter persona while serving in China’s mission to Pakistan, including a heated July 2019 exchange with former US national security adviser Susan Rice about alleged racial segregation in Washington.
He quickly became associated with a more confrontational generation of “wolf warrior” diplomats, referring to a series of action films depicting a Rambo-like hero vanquishing foreign foes.
His appointment to the spokesperson’s office in August 2019 was seen as an endorsement of Zhao’s style from above, and numerous other Chinese diplomats around the world embraced it.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Zhao prompted outrage in the US by promoting a conspiracy theory about the origin of COVID-19, questioning whether it was brought to Wuhan by visiting American athletes.
Zhao also courted controversy when he wrote on Twitter an apparent reference to allegations that Australian soldiers in Afghanistan were involved in unlawful killings, prompting the Australian prime minister to demand an apology.
Last year, Zhao was among the chief purveyors of Russian-backed conspiracy theories about US bioweapons labs in Ukraine.
The assertive approach was popular with Chinese Internet audiences eager for a response to then-US president Donald Trump’s Twitter-driven foreign policy.
It also contributed to a collapse in public support across the developed world, with the share of people in the US with unfavorable views of China rising to 82 percent in 2021.
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