China ties: Supreme wolf Zhao Lijian leads Xi Jinping’s warrior brigade

The unrestrained aggression of Zhao Lijian’s statements, the absolute certainty that Beijing is always right, and his resulting rapid promotion have seen him soar into fame within China’s elite. Picture: AFP

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, whose latest insulting tweet about Australian soldiers in Afghanistan has provoked such antipathy, is not merely one wolf-warrior diplomat among many. He is the prototype.

Australia’s outrage will not concern Zhao, who is assured that it will only burnish his growing reputation in Beijing.

It is the unrestrained aggression of his statements, the absolute certainty that Beijing is always right, and his resulting rapid promotion that have seen him soar into fame within China’s elite as a model for the kind of official most admired by the Communist Party cohort surrounding President Xi Jinping.

Aged 48, he worked at the ­embassy in Washington before a posting as minister counsellor in Islamabad, Pakistan, one of China’s closest partners, for four years until late 2019.

Several years ago he joined Twitter, an American-owned platform that remains banned in China and can only be used or read there by subscribers to also-banned Virtual Private Networks.

He catapulted into global ­notice in July last year when he succeeded in embroiling Susan Rice, who was national security adviser during the Barack Obama presidency, in a Twitter spat. Zhao’s final message calling her a disgrace “and shockingly ignorant, too”, and branding her preceding tweet “disgraceful & disgusting”, was recirculated within the Chinese media-sphere where it drew excited applause from nationalist netizens.

At a party to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Chinese Foreign Ministry in October last year, Foreign Minister Wang Yi urged the country’s envoys to adopt a “fighting spirit” in the face of international challenges as Beijing pursued regional and global authority in Xi’s “new era”.

The ministry had been widely perceived as losing influence within the Chinese power structure as Xi moved onto the front foot at home and abroad — in part because its tradition had been one of professional and courteous ­diplomacy.

Now the old breed of diplomats were pushed to one side as success and promotion were sought by those eager to brandish that “fighting spirit”, and the Foreign Ministry itself retrieved its status within the party elite.

Its new informal title came from China’s biggest blockbuster movie, the patriotic, Rambo-style Wolf Warrior 2, whose slogan, adapted from a Han dynasty saying, was: “Whoever offends China will be punished, no matter how far they are.”

Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Frances Adamson last week told the Australian National University’s National Security College that “China may have reached a point where it believes that it can largely set the terms of its future engagement with the world”.

 

Zhao certainly appears to believe that. He has become a hero to his peers, especially members of the ambitious younger cohort within the Foreign Ministry.”

In January, he was promoted to deputy director of the ministry’s highly strategic information department, and became the government’s most prominent spokesman — underlining the fact that unremitting verbal aggression, rather than quiet diplomacy or seeking to persuade other countries to see things Beijing’s way, is the new path to success within the Chinese system.

His popularity with the party elite reached new heights as Beijing reeled from its failures as COVID struck Wuhan. Zhao tweeted to his 623,000 followers that it had been US soldiers who had brought the virus to the city when competing in the 2019 Military World Games.

Australian Hong Kong-based China-expert Ryan Manuel has written that Zhao and the fellow wolf-warriors within the pack “win no overseas hearts and minds and have little to no success in spreading Chinese values”. “But they may look tough back home, regardless of their diplomatic self-harm. And this is the audience they care most about,” he wrote.

Expect more of the same. Zhao is just warming up.

Rowan Callick, twice a China correspondent for The Australian, is an industry fellow at Griffith University’s Asia Institute.