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.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.