Xi Jinping: Leader of the Wolf Pack > Articles

For observers of the discourse emanating from China’s foreign ministry, these are colorful and entertaining times. But they are seldom diplomatic. Consider the blunt force of recent remarks on Twitter by spokesperson Hua Chunying as she addressed June allegations by US trade advisor Peter Navarro that China had exploited the Covid-19 crisis.¹“Navarro has many sins. The biggest sin is LYING,” Hua wrote with all-caps emphasis.

As the relationship between the United States and China has deteriorated in recent months, bullets of antagonism have flown in both directions. Skirmishes have often erupted over Twitter, a platform banned for the Chinese population but accessible to its diplomatic elites. When Morgan Ortagus, a spokesperson at the US Department of State, posted on Aug. 23 that, “Gone are the days where the Chinese Communist Party will steal our intellectual property, science and secrets, or just blatantly ignore the international order,” Hua fired back: “Gone are the days where the #US is esteemed as [a] ‘shining city upon a hill.’ ” Ouch.

Wolves will be wolves. In the West, this is the explanation increasingly given for China’s more aggressive brand of diplomacy — more nationalistic, more sharply defensive, and swaggering with confidence. Over the past year, the phrase “wolf-warrior diplomacy” has come to encompass what has for several years been seen as China’s drift away from Deng Xiaoping’s famous foreign policy maxim: “Hide your strength and bide your time.”² First mentioned in a Chinese-language commentary on the BBC, “wolf-warrior diplomacy” is a reference to the action-packed 2017 film Wolf Warrior II. In this Chinese blockbuster, a Rambo-like elite soldier from the People’s Liberation Army, played by the film’s director, Wu Jing, handily defeats American-led mercenaries in Africa who imperil local civilians. The phrase “wolf warrior” suggests a stiff-jawed, macho confidence, and a readiness to exchange blows. No longer is China hiding its strengths. And often, its diplomats seem to be spoiling for a fight.

How can we account for this new wolfishness?

Offense and Defense

For its part, China has rejected the “wolf warrior diplomacy” label. In July 2019, shortly after the phrase first appeared, the nationalistic Global Times newspaper insisted that the more aggressive tone among Chinese media and diplomats was purely defensive, an attempt to “unmask Western pride and prejudice.” The newspaper wrote: “Almost all of Chinese diplomats’ criticism of the US and the West is a response or counterattack when being provoked.” Back in May, as China’s undiplomatic overtures seemed to kick up dust everywhere. Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to the UK, also claimed self-defense, saying wolves were needed to fight wolves. “Some say Chinese diplomats are ‘wolf warriors,’ but this is because there are wolves in the world,” he said. “When there are wolves, there must be wolf warriors to struggle against them.”

The self-defense argument cannot, however, explain the relative recentness of China’s more offensive posture. The Chinese Communist Party has long carped about international affronts to China’s image and character, and since at least 2007, when enhancing “soft power” was defined as a key priority at a major Party congress, it has talked about the need to raise its “discourse power” and overturn the West’s international “discourse hegemony,” seen as a point of serious vulnerability. But wolfishness never became a diplomatic constant, not even after a contentious 2008, when a number of bolder actions by China prompted the FT’s Chinese-language website to write that the country had “shown the sword,” a phrase often used officially to signal toughness and resolve.

Another notch against China’s self-defense argument is the way it has applied its newly wolfish tone everywhere, even beyond the rancor of US-China relations. In Europe, too, the tone has been impossible to ignore — even as China has courted European partners in the hope, as it says, of finding “support for multilateralism amid US unilateralism.”³ In April, as China reveled in domestic propaganda over its declared victory against Covid-19, an unnamed Chinese diplomat in Paris wrote an article attacking the epidemic response in Western countries as inadequate, making the demonstrably false claim that nursing home workers in France had abandoned their posts, “leaving the residents to die of hunger and disease.” The article, posted to the website of the Chinese Embassy in Paris, sparked fury in the French Senate.⁴

Visiting Europe recently, Foreign Minister Wang Yi sought again to depict China as the victim of a predatory United States. He urged his European audience to resist the “extremist forces” of the US. His talk of “shared human destiny,” however, was paired with threats to a member of the Czech senate over a visit to Taiwan, as he called the politician an “enemy of 1.4 billion Chinese people” and vowed that he would pay a “heavy price.”⁵ He also issued a stern warning to Norway that it must not award a Nobel Peace Prize to demonstrators in Hong Kong. Wang dismissed European concerns over human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and even tried to cast doubt on China as the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic.⁶

Even as China’s diplomats talk about safeguarding peace and multilateralism, about win-win and other tired clichés, their snarls have become impossible to ignore. On the day of Wang Yi’s arrival in Paris, Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, underscored rising concerns over China’s behavior globally with an article in the French press accusing China of building a “new empire.”⁷ In a press conference with Wang outside Berlin, German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass voiced concern over his counterpart’s statements on the Czech Republic and stressed that “threats have no place in respectful relations.” The same day, Slovakian President Zuzana Čaputová wrote on her official Twitter account: “#Slovakia stands by the Czech Republic. #EU-#China relations are based on dialogue and mutual respect. Threats directed at one of the EU members and its representatives contradict the very essence of our partnership and as such are unacceptable.”

There are a growing number of examples suggesting that China’s charm-and-growl strategy has alarmed and alienated partners. But the country’s diplomats remain impervious. Why?

Foreign affairs experts have suggested various reasons for the new wolfishness: China is now economically powerful, with a much larger military to back up its confidence; nationalism has become increasingly core to the CCP’s legitimacy as economic development has slowed, therefore Chinese leaders talk tough to please audiences at home; a generational shift within China’s foreign ministry has resulted in a new crop of diplomats, like Hua Chunying, who are emboldened to conduct diplomacy in a more strident, public and assertive manner.

All of these explanations to some degree have merit. But they don’t get to the core of where China’s new boldness comes from. “Wolf warrior diplomacy” is not fundamentally about diplomacy at all, but about a deeper shift in Chinese politics, one that should invite profound global concern. It is ultimately about the rise of charismatic politics in China, about the erosion of collective leadership in favor of a cult of personality around Xi Jinping. In today’s China, Xi Jinping is the pack leader, and his instinct for power drives the country’s governing calculus, and also its foreign policy.

Politics and the Pack Mentality

The defining feature of Chinese politics since Xi Jinping came to power in late 2012 has been the consolidation of power in Xi’s hands and the move away from a more collective style of leadership — culminating in the formal removal in 2018 of the two-term limit on China’s presidency. This trend can be seen in all areas of policy, from cybersecurity to “deepening reform,” as supra-government “small groups” have expanded the powers of the CCP at the expense of bureaucratic ministries and local governments. Since the release of new CCP disciplinary regulations in October 2015, officials have also been under extraordinary pressure to avoid “improper discussion of the policies of the Central Party,” the key message being that all must remain obedient to Xi Jinping as the CCP’s “core” leader.

Beyond these structural changes, Xi has exerted a level of personal dominance unseen since the rule of Mao Zedong in the pre-reform era. This could be seen readily at the 19th National Congress of the CCP in October 2017, as he managed to seal his legacy with a banner term including his own name, a feat none since Deng Xiaoping has achieved. The phrase, “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era,” is a mouthful — for now. But we can anticipate, possibly over the next year, that the phrase will formally become shortened to the more potent “Xi Jinping Thought,” signaling Xi’s full parity with Mao.

In this seemingly esoteric process we can clearly glimpse the magnetic-pull of personality politics on Chinese diplomacy in the Xi Jinping era. On July 20, several weeks ahead of his European tour, Foreign Minister Wang Yi attended a ceremony in Beijing to unveil a new research center for “Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy,” during which China’s top diplomat fawningly referred to this concept — itself an important step in formalizing “Xi Thought” in a key policy area, thereby consolidating Xi’s position — as “an epoch-making achievement in the construction of diplomatic theory in the new China.” Writing in a top CCP journal 10 days later, Wang said Xi Jinping’s foreign policy approach has shown “the vision and sagacity of a great strategist.”⁸

If Wang Yi seemed tone deaf to concerns during his trip to Europe, this is the primary reason why. His overtures in Europe, though of course touching on substantive issues such as investment, were not necessarily about his French, German or Norwegian hosts, but about the wolf-in-chief waiting back in Beijing.

Analysts could spend hours parsing “Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy,” picking over the heaps of CCP neologisms like “building community of common destiny for mankind,” and “major-country diplomacy with Chinese characteristics.” But the core point to take away from the founding of the new center inaugurated by Wang Yi is that Chinese diplomacy today is driven primarily by the internal need to elevate the person and power of Xi Jinping himself, to pledge allegiance and build on his prestige. The new center, and Wang’s flattering talk of “vision and sagacity,” were offerings made at the feet of the general secretary.

This pack mentality has directly impacted the way China conducts diplomacy, in ways, big and small, that have sometimes puzzled foreign diplomats. At a dinner in Berlin two years ago, I listened as one senior German diplomat shared her bewilderment over why Chinese diplomats now insisted on giving away copies of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China. A Chinese scholar seated at the table cleared up the question with a crash course on the CCP’s internal culture and dynamics under Xi Jinping. This, they said, was about Chinese diplomats currying favor and scoring points with their master in Beijing, and was not otherwise strategic.

The gifting of Xi’s eponymous books may seem harmless enough, but such tone deaf gestures point to the way the personality of China’s new strongman has seeped into its diplomacy. To understand Chinese foreign policy, we must ask not just what China means when it talks about values like “multilateralism,” but more urgently what kind of personality we are dealing with. As we have already seen, Xi is determined even to the point of absurdity to place himself at center stage.

One of the earliest and clearest indications of what kind of leader Xi Jinping would be came early in his first term. In January 2013, as he made a tour of China’s south, he recalled a similar trip by Deng Xiaoping in 1992 and Xi seemed publicly to champion further reforms. Behind closed doors, his message to Party leaders was tough and uncompromising.⁹ And something else: macho.

At one point, Xi’s topic was the collapse of the Soviet Union, a cautionary tale that still looms large within the CCP. “Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Soviet Communist Party collapse?” Xi asked. The Party had lost sight of its values and convictions, he said, and had failed to maintain its grip on the armed forces. In essence, Soviet leaders had grown soft. Then, as Xi summed up his lesson, came a line that epitomizes the ethos of his leadership, and also his approach to diplomacy: “The Soviet Communist Party surpassed us in terms of the proportion of party members [in Soviet society], but no one was a man, and no one came out to fight.”

Xi’s words on his southern tour in a sense foreshadowed what director Wu Jing would say after the release of Wolf Warrior II, that the purpose of the story was to “inspire men to be real men.” A brash and growling manliness, directed toward the defense of the CCP empire, is the spirit that defines diplomacy, and much else, in Xi’s China.

One year ago, Xi again made his appeal for manliness directly to CCP officials. “Leaders and cadres,” Xi said, “must persistently sharpen themselves on the grindstone of major struggle… daring to show their swords on major issues of principle.”¹⁰ Shortly after this speech, the Party’s official People’s Daily newspaper admonished officials, particularly younger ones, for being “weak-kneed and unwilling to fight.”¹¹

Xi Jinping is the country’s alpha male, the leader of the pack, determined to inspire a fighting spirit in the Party’s ranks. And he is the reason that China’s hackles have gone up.

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