 So was China Institute. This is our second seminar webinar this term. And may I remind you that this meeting is being recorded and it will be made available on our website afterwards. When you would like to raise a question, please use the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. When you do so, and if you would like to stay anonymous, please say so and your wish will be respected. Nonetheless, it would be helpful to me as the moderator to know who you are. So if you could provide some information as to who you are, it will simply make it easier for me to moderate and pick the questions, but I will respect those who would prefer us to stay anonymous. The subject of today's webinar is the making of China's Wu Warrior diplomacy. And the speaker we have is Peter Martin, who has just written a book on this very subject. Peter is a career journalist with Bloomberg. He had previously been based in Beijing, where he covered extensively on the escalating tension between China and the United States. And he also reported from China's border with North Korea and in terms of China's Xinjiang area. He is now based back in the United States in or around Washington DC, where he is Bloomberg's defense policy and intelligence report. And the subject itself is, of course, a very important one as we have seen in the last two years, a significant change in the way how China manages its diplomacy. With that, all wish to you, Peter, for your introduction. Yeah, thanks so much for hosting me. It's a real pleasure to be talking to SOAS. When I was studying in London, made a habit of spending as much time as I could in the SOAS Library, which is just a wonderful facility. And so I'm a great admirer of the institution. But, so I thought I would talk a little bit about how I came to write the book and then outline some of my key arguments. And I guess the starting point for this was really my arriving back in China in early 2017. I'd been away for a few years living in India and then in Washington. And it was immediately struck when I arrived back in Beijing by the extraordinary economic and military progress that China had made. It was rolling out, Xi Jinping was rolling out the Belt and Road Infrastructure Initiative. China's economy was beating estimates. China was on the cusp of opening its first overseas military base in Djibouti. And of course, the Chinese military was also busy building artificial islands in the South China Sea. But perhaps more important than any of that, there was this extraordinary opportunity there created by the Trump administration in large part. Trump was busy picking fights with US allies all over the world and taking issue with multinational institutions, multilateral institutions. And there seemed to be this kind of leadership vacuum developing, which was ripe for China's taking, I think. And we saw in Xi Jinping's speech to the Davos Forum in January, 2017, a real concerted effort to kind of step up and take that mantle. But the longer I was based in Beijing and that the more I kind of watched this unfold, that the clearer it became, that it had really been incredibly difficult for China to step up and take on that leadership role. And that as effective as the Chinese government was at using economic inducements to win over others or threats of coercion in other cases to dissuade people from acting in ways it didn't like, the ability to actively persuade other countries and publics in other nations of China's point of view was a real shortcoming of the system. And it made it hard for China to step up into that vacuum. And I started to think about why that was and why it might matter. And I think the reason it matters is that we're moving away from a world which is centered and built around any one power in the international system. We're gonna have multiple centers of global power, including Beijing. And the ability of any one country to kind of have its way is gonna be limited. And there'll be an advantage for nations which are able to make their case and have that power to persuade. And so for me, Chinese diplomats kind of became a microcosm of China's broader struggle to communicate with the outside world. And I saw this on a personal level as well when you meet with Chinese diplomats in person or you talk to foreign diplomats who do so frequently as well, you realize that Chinese diplomats are highly educated, they're fluent often in multiple foreign languages, they've become deeply expert in the societies to which they've been posted over the years, as well as issues ranging from financial regulation to climate change and non-proliferation and beyond. And they can be suave and funny and very effective on a personal level. But when they get up on the podium in the foreign ministry to give press conferences or they sit across the table from their foreign counterparts, you see that effectiveness kind of diminish and the behavior becomes much more stilted, sometimes ideological. And in recent years, of course, also increasingly hostile when they're sitting across from others. And I started to get curious about what were the roots of this behavior and why was there this huge gap between capability and delivery? And as it did so, I was doing interviews, of course, with people in Beijing and here in Washington and elsewhere, but I also became drawn to this collection of memoirs by former Chinese diplomats, starting out with, there were a couple of memoirs written by former foreign ministers and really very senior figures, but I soon discovered using Baidu and secondhand bookshops and government bookshops and those kinds of things that there were more than a hundred of these memoirs written by figures ranging from former foreign ministers to ambassadors to cultural attaches and military attaches and junior diplomats and a whole range of backgrounds. And I really use that as my main source base for this book, which started off, I think is a relatively niche topic, but as Wolf Warrior diplomacy as it's become known, kind of became this global phenomenon and Chinese diplomats were seen storming out of international meetings, insulting foreign counterparts, telling foreign politicians to shut up on Twitter and perhaps most provocatively of all, spreading conspiracy theories about the origins of COVID-19. The topic of the book became much more mainstream and I guess I was pleased and I was lucky that I'd been looking into it for some time and the thing I think that stood out for me as a result of looking at all of these memoirs and conducting the interviews that I had done is that Wolf Warrior diplomacy seems very new on the surface but actually its roots go back a long, long way. So when the PRC was founded by Mao Zedong in 1949, China basically had no diplomats to speak of. The new communist government had kicked out the small number of Kuomintang diplomats who had decided to stay behind and it didn't allow them to take part in China's diplomatic service beyond some very perfunctory sort of advisory roles. The reason for that was that the new regime believed that these diplomats were too impure to represent it on the international stage, too ideologically impure and the government kind of faced this paradoxical challenge the founding of the PRC. On the one hand, this was a political regime which was obsessed with secrecy, was highly paranoid, was acutely aware that its very existence had been threatened from its earliest days that had been hounded across the country and forced into this kind of underground existence and remained extremely wary of threats from the capitalist United States to the rival regime in Taiwan which claimed to be the legitimate government of China. But at the same time as it was wary of those threats it also needed to build bridges with the outside world and to communicate and win friends and establish itself as the rightful government of China in the eyes of the international system. And Joe and Lai, China's first foreign minister, the PRC's first foreign minister and the PRC's first premier came up with this idea that to kind of square that circle where he said that Chinese diplomats would think and act like quote the People's Liberation Army in civilian clothing when drunken function in Chinese. He said that Chinese diplomats would be unfailingly loyal to the Communist Party. They would be disciplined to a full and they would display what he called a fighting spirit whenever China's interests were challenged. And what that did was that it created for China's first diplomats this kind of martial militaristic ethos which came with a bunch of behaviors which were very distinctive and were there in 1949, 1950 and many of which have lasted right through till today. So among those, you have the fact that the PRC diplomats will stick incredibly closely to talking points even if they're fully aware that those talking points don't resonate with the person sitting across the table from them. They will move around in pairs using this buddy system to ensure that they're keeping tabs on each other. The system in Chinese is called A-R-N Tongxiang two people moving together. They will sometimes shout at foreign counterparts when they feel like they've been cornered or they worry that they won't look tough enough back home. And they will take even the smallest of slights or provocations as sometimes and turn them into major international incidents. When they worry that their failure to do so will result in them being judged as disloyal back home. And so this approach to diplomacy led to displays of what we would now call wolf warrior diplomacy right from the outset. So in 1950, this veteran revolutionary leader Wu Xiuquan, the guy had a bullet scar across his cheek. He was a really sort of hardened communist. He led a delegation to the United Nations in New York and he delivered the speech, which honestly kind of makes today's wolf warriors look like a bunch of wimps. I mean, Wu stood up and he delivered remarks which Time Magazine described at the time as two awful hours of rust in the tupperation, which gives you some idea of the tone. And of course, in the following decade in the 1960s, Chinese diplomats were pictured engaging in fistfights on the streets of London. They were expelled from some Asian and African nations. And actually one diplomat was pictured wielding an axe outside the Chinese representative office in London. But so while those wolf warrior type tactics were there from the outset, it's important also to remember that there's an alternative tradition in PRC diplomacy, which is based around this idea that China needs to win friends and to build influence around the world. And so other times China's diplomatic corps was capable of taking that great discipline which Zhou and Li had stressed the need for and turning it toward charm offensives which would win over the world. We saw that happen with great effect in the mid-1950s at the Bandung Conference. Of course, Professor Tang has written an excellent article about the bomb plot that nearly killed Zhou and Li on the way to that conference. But, you know, Zhou kind of set aside his notes and delivered this impromptu speech which didn't stress the status of Taiwan, didn't stress communist ideology and really was able to help build trust and win friends by doing that. Then in the 1990s, Chinese diplomats were highly effective and launched this kind of fight back across the world to improve China's reputation in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre and launched this multi-decade charm offensive which culminated in Beijing hosting the 2008 Summer Olympics. So I kind of think of these two tendencies in PRC diplomacy. There's a tendency to charm the world and there's a tendency to use wolf warrior tactics to tell the world off. And I think that, you know, since 2008 and especially in the last few years we've seen quite a decisive lurch back toward that kind of combative, assertive approach. And I think that's been driven by two things. On the one hand, there's a new confidence on the part of the PRC. And, you know, on the other hand there are enduring insecurities which exist alongside it. The new confidence I think really started in 2008 with, you know, after China had successfully hosted the Olympics, its leaders spearheaded this incredibly decisive response to the global financial crisis which was hailed around the world. You know, it created kind of longer term problems for the Chinese economy, but at the time was hailed around the world as helping to save the global economy. And that confidence that kind of went hand in hand with that, this idea that China had a system that could deliver when the West was fumbling and incapable of doing so. That confidence led to a couple of years of really quite assertive diplomacy from 2008 to sort of 2010, which was, there was a brief recalibration and then the assertiveness continued full throttle after Xi Jinping became Communist Party General Secretary in the winter of 2012, November 2012. And since she became General Secretary, you know, Chinese politics, China's political system has become an increasingly tense and in some respects kind of scary place. She launched a sweeping anti-corruption campaign which saw more than 1.5 million officials punished. He abolished presidential term limits. He experimented with the use of reeducation camps in China's far Western region of Xinjiang. He focused on ideology at home and his speeches have displayed kind of, in some cases, a hostility to outside influences in PRC politics and society. And when Chinese diplomats see these signals, they have this rich context and understanding for what they mean, which many of us as outsiders, I think, lack. And you need to remember that over the decades, Chinese diplomats have experienced multiple rounds of purges inside the foreign ministry where colleagues have informed on each other. During the Cultural Revolution, junior diplomats locked Chinese ambassadors in cellars. They forced them to clean toilets and in some cases, they beat them until they coughed up blood. And indeed, many Chinese diplomats during that period were sent to reeducation camps themselves in the Chinese countryside. And so I think it's fair to say that Chinese diplomats know how high the stakes can be when you get on the wrong side of the Chinese political system. And so I think what happened was that all of this kind of backdrop helped set a new tone for Chinese diplomacy. And when PRC diplomats heard President Xi talking about China moving closer to the center of the global stage, China standing tall in the East, the fact that China would never be bullied, would never give up one inch of territory and all of these, you know, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, all of these phrases which we associate with Xi's presidency and his expectations to China's role in the world. Chinese diplomats kind of took them and mimicked them. And in some cases, if they were ambitious, they added a little bit of extra zeal of a good measure. And I think that that goes a long way to explaining the roots of PRC, Wolf Warrior diplomacy. And that tone really went into high gear after the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. You know, on the one hand, China was under attack for its role in allegedly covering up the origins of the virus. But it also felt like it had a model that had been vindicated by its ability to stop the spread of the virus after the initial outbreak. And its leaders looked around the world to Europe and North America and the inability of those political systems to handle that challenge. And kind of similarly to in the financial crisis, they felt that their system had stood the test pretty well and there was no need for them to listen to hectoring or lecturing from the outside. And I think the result of that was this kind of series of outbursts around the world where, as I say, Chinese diplomats were engaging in Twitter spat with foreign diplomats. They were telling people to shut up. There were incidents in countries ranging from Fiji to Papua New Guinea to Brazil to Venezuela to France to Canada to England and so on. And, you know, all of this, I think apparently was chaired on by President Xi who at one point wrote a handwritten note to the leadership of the foreign ministry calling for more fighting spirit in Chinese diplomacy. And if one figure has kind of become emblematic of that shift, I think it's one of the current foreign ministry spokesman, Zhao Li-jin. So Zhao started off as this relatively obscure figure posted to Islamabad. And he managed to get himself into a Twitter fight with Susan Rice. He built up a large Twitter follower which was incredibly rare at the time for a Chinese diplomat. And after getting into that fight with former national security advisor, Susan Rice, he kind of became this rock star inside the foreign ministry who was catapulted to fame and quickly found himself appointed spokesman for the MFA, making him not just one of the most prominent Chinese diplomats in the world, but one of the most important faces representing the Chinese government to the world. And since taking up that position, he has angered pretty much everyone who's come across his path. But especially the Australian government, he posted an image, an illustration, I guess you should say, of Australian troops committing human rights abuses. He spread a conspiracy theory which said that the US Army had started the coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, angering people all the way up to the Trump administration. And but, you know, Zhao was not alone among these kind of wolf warrior figures. The recently departed Chinese ambassador to Sweden, Guaitangyo, was summoned to Sweden's foreign ministry 40 times in the space of two years because of his provocative behavior. When he was asked about it in an interview with the media, he said, for our friends, we have fine wine. And for our enemies, we have shotguns. I think it's important to stress that not everyone in Chinese diplomatic circles likes this new approach. There are this considerable disquiet under the surface, both in the foreign ministry, but also in the kind of intellectual foreign policy circles in Beijing and beyond. Yuan Nansheng, China's former consul general in San Francisco, has won publicly about a trend toward what he calls extreme nationalism in Chinese foreign policy and his fear that that might alienate the world. And early on this summer, actually Xi Jinping himself told the Politburo study session that the country needed to cultivate a more lovable image on the global stage, which I think was at least a kind of tacit recognition that some of China's kind of external propaganda work and its diplomacy was creating a backlash overseas and that in many cases, Chinese diplomats have been more frightening than lovable in recent years. But as I say, the roots of this behavior go back a very, very long way. And the fighting spirit that we've all come to know has been there from the very start. And so I guess with that, I'll pause my remarks and I look forward to a fun Q&A with all of you and some back and forth. Well, thank you very much, Peter, for that very interesting overview. And I will kick off with a question, but before I do that, let me just remind everybody that if you would like to raise a question or make a comment, please use the Q&A box. If possible, please provide some information about who you are. But if you would like to stay anonymous, please say so in your questions and I will respect that. Peter, you gave a historic view of the origins of wolf warrior diplomacy and you underlined quite a bit of continuity there. I would like to push you here in terms of that continuity. I'm wondering whether we really are comparing like with like with the early years of PRC diplomacy and the recent specific brand of wolf warrior approach to diplomacy, which is an oxymoron. I mean, wolf warrior diplomacy is inherently self-constructory. Of the 1950s and the 1960s that you referred to, you underlined that China did not really have many diplomats. And it was also a period of time when the Chinese government, under Mao, was really not that worried about engaging with the rest of the world beyond the socialist fraternity. And therefore, you had the kind of antics that you cited of general so-tran at the United Nations and that kind of behavior. But relatively, in fact, feel and far between. I mean, when the Chinese diplomats storm out of the Chinese embassy in London to attack people demonstrating outside, it was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution when it was a matter of political survival for some of the diplomats to behave the ways that they did. In the same period, and you yourself have cited example of Zhou and I at Bangdong. And they were not that difficult to find other locations and examples to show how Chinese diplomacy, when it was necessary, was sophisticated and effective. And Zhou and I himself had that classic picture of embarrassing, was it John Foster, the Dalist at the Geneva Conference of 1954, when it was Zhou and I who extended his hand, which Dalas did not take. And it presented a very negative image of American diplomacy and they were the positive image of Chinese diplomacy. So what I'm putting to you is that that's quite a different kind of situation where they did not have enough well-trained diplomats to be effective to begin with. There was not a priority to project a positive image of China, but if and when they did require that they were perfectly able to do that. Whereas now we have a policy of the Chinese government to promote a good public image of China, to promote soft power in China at a time when China has enormous capacity to exert soft power. And yet it has produced proof warrior diplomats. Are we comparing like with like here? Tremendous question. And there's kind of a lot to dig into. So I guess the first thing that I would say is that of course it's always difficult to draw direct comparisons between and sort of suggest that the past is working in the same way as the present. And there's that famous quote often attributed to Mark Twain where he says that the history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. And I think that that's the right way to think of these kind of historical cycles between as I was saying, these wolf warrior tactics and then these charm offensive sort of behaviors in the past. And in the book I kind of do this chapter by chapter breakdown where I detail many instances, as you said, of this kind of charm diplomacy and the sophistication. And then quite a lot of instances of these kind of more combative tactics to stretching from Warsaw to China in 1950, but also of course the extended period of the Sino-Soviet split. Virtually all of China's diplomacy toward the West at periods in the 1950s could be changed in charm diplomacy toward the Gauls front and those kind of things. So there's this kind of cycling in and out over time. But I think the reason that the comparison is instructive is that many of the behaviors and the incentives that drove Chinese diplomats to act in those ways in the past still exist in the foreign ministry of today. And the reason that those incentives are similar are, first of all, China's political system in some, of course there have been great changes, but in some very fundamental ways, China's political system has works in sort of comparable ways from 1949 through to now with the Politburo structure and this idea that the writ of the party runs through the whole government apparatus. And you know, it is interesting actually, if you have talked to some Chinese diplomats about this, you know, the fact that when Wang Yi became foreign minister, he used this language again of Chinese diplomats being the People's Liberation Army and civilian clothing. And it's been kind of, if you look at the memoirs over the years, it's been this continuous reference point where they'll use this phrase, almost always in Chinese, almost never in English, to talk about the ethos of the foreign ministry. And one diplomat I mentioned it to said that he thought the foreign ministry was almost unique in the government because of the degree of continuity that was there from 49 and now. And I think of it a little bit like J. Edgar Hoover's impact on the FBI. It was this institution that was kind of molded in the image of one person in the case of the foreign ministry, Zhou Enlai. And it's kind of a way of thinking and it's a way of doing business was pretty consistent over time, given the dramatic and extraordinary changes that China overwent during that period. I hope that goes some way to answering your question. Thank you. We already have seven or eight questions in the Q&A box. The first question I picked comes from Sir Henry Cassek Steege, Chairman Emeritus of Jardin Matheson. Given your remarks, do you think the British policy of constructive engagement can be successful in China's today? It's a good question. I suppose that there's already, you would all know, despite my accent, you would all know what's going on in the UK much better than I would. But it seems to me that there's kind of already been a shift away from the kind of constructive, quote unquote, constructive engagement that we saw in the Cameron Osborne era, where there was this idea that if you quiet down on criticism of the PRC, you could get all kinds of economic benefits in return. I think that that has changed quite significantly in the UK. There's now, I think, whereas the context that allowed Cameron and Osborne to pursue that policy was a kind of interparty apathy on the issue of China. There wasn't very much political interest in how the UK foreign policy dealt with the PRC. And there was therefore a lot of space for the government to improvise its own policy. It's clear now that on the conservative benches in the Labour Party and beyond, there is considerable interest in China. And there is quite a lot of pressure for the UK to take a tougher stance. And that's resulted in Boris Johnson, who has on numerous occasions described himself as a natural signophile following the US, to a large extent, on the issue of Huawei joining the Orca Steel recently, which, of course, was a great affront to the PRC. And, you know, strengthening five-eyes cooperation when it comes to intelligence on the PRC and all kinds of other measures. And so I guess that constructive engagement approach has already started to kind of be chipped away at a little bit. And I'd be curious to hear from all of you on whether that assessment is accurate. Peter, the question really isn't about whether the UK is still doing it. I think the first question is, is it a sensible approach? Can it work if the Chinese behave like wolf warriors rather than behaving like normal diplomats? Yeah. So I want to make sure that I don't give kind of policy advice, because that's not appropriate for me to do. The question doesn't come from the government. The question's come from somebody in this community. I get it. I think that if you talk to people in Washington about who have conducted dialogue with the PRC for decades, there's a feeling that the kind of formal mechanisms that went into constructive engagement or however you want to describe the policy, the era of engagement is the way that Kurt Campbell in the White House has described it, the strategic and economic dialogue and various other mechanisms. They kind of became like dead ends for negotiating with the Chinese. The Chinese side would show up with increasingly over the years a very fixed set of talking points. They wouldn't compromise, and they weren't willing to engage in very much back and forth at all. And that's the reason, or one of the reasons that those dialogues were largely scrapped by the Trump administration and have not been brought back by the Biden administration. And so I do think that there's a lot of consensus in the US and beyond that those kind of mechanisms didn't have very much success with the PRC, that they shouldn't be brought back in their sort of previous form, and also a strong feeling that wolf warrior diplomacy has made that worse. So President Biden said in his recent phone call with Xi Jinping that he was frustrated that the engagement with China had become quite unconstructive. And I think he was referencing these displays in places like Anchorage when US diplomats met with their Chinese counterparts, where the PRC interlocutors, Yang Yichu, in particular, launched this kind of 17-minute diatribe end to his counterparts. And so, yeah, I think there's a widespread feeling that that type of engagement had gotten harder, and that wolf warrior diplomacy has made it even more difficult. OK, we have quite a few questions from very thoughtful people, but I would like to pick the next question from Ryota Imamura. Could you please explain the merits and demerits of wolf warrior diplomacy? Do you think the Chinese government is selectively taking the wolf warrior diplomacy after considering and calculating the pros and cons of this policy, of this approach? I thought this follows pretty well as to what you were ending with the previous answer. Yeah, so I think the answer, in short, is that wolf warrior diplomacy is not primarily aimed at foreign audiences. I think when Chinese diplomats engage in this kind of behavior, it's primarily aimed at audiences back in Beijing. There's Xi Jinping, who has set this kind of assertive tone for Chinese foreign policy. There's the broader Chinese political elite, which has decided post-2008, but especially in more recent years, that China needs to take a more assertive stance on the global stage. And of course, there's the Chinese public, which has very high expectations of the way that China can now step up and take a leadership role and no longer needs to kind of kowtow to the West. And I think that wolf warrior diplomacy is primarily aimed at ticking those boxes and pleasing those people. And actually, you do get quite a strong sense that while there are some people like Zhao Lijian, who have embraced this kind of new approach with Great Zeal, there are a lot of people, perhaps even more people, who are quite uncomfortable with it and are fully aware of how these kind of displays will alienate audiences in the countries where they have, after all, spent decades studying and living and being posted. And they know full well that a lot of these tactics backfire, but they find themselves in a political climate that is conducive to that type of behavior. So I think to a large extent, Wolf Warrior diplomacy has failed in terms of the metric of, when it comes to the metric of, has it improved China's image? Has it helped persuade others? I think what it's done is brought into much sharper focus, the outside world's kind of estimations of China's intentions. There was for a long time this gap between China's assertive military policies and its policy toward territorial disputes and those kind of things. And then the very soft and ameliorative language that the foreign ministry and other outward facing institutions would use to describe China's intentions. But I think Wolf Warrior diplomacy has kind of narrowed the gap between those two things, between action and description. And has, as I said, has brought that into clearer focus. Can I actually push you here? Because you said this Wolf Warrior diplomacy is primarily for the audience of one. And that is Xi Jinping. And the question is about the calculation of cost and benefits. Does Xi Jinping do the cost and benefit calculation? Does he see Wolf Warrior diplomacy as positive for China or negative for China? If he sees it as negative, why will he be pushing for it? Yeah, so my answer was that on the part of the foreign ministry, which is, of course, the institution which has implemented it, there is a cost-benefit analysis. But the benefits are mainly aimed at pleasing Xi. On Xi's part, I think that he has kind of been steeped in hard power in every aspect of his upbringing and his kind of political tutelage and has created this worldview where strength is rewarded, strength wins deference. And foreign opinion can be, will fall into line, in line with national power. And I remember having a conversation with a Chinese diplomat before I left Beijing, who said that he didn't say who that he was referencing here. But he said that there is this widespread view in China, which is in the Chinese government becoming increasingly widespread, that China no longer needs soft power because it can simply buy others silence or approval. So I think that on the part of Xi Jinping, he wants to see this tough assertive tone. And he probably thinks we're all guessing to a large extent, right? We have to go off publicly available information. But I think he likes the new assertive tone. And he assumes that any downside that there is will be compensated for by the fact that the PRC's national power is on such a dramatic trajectory. OK. The next question I pick is kind of picking up on this. And that comes from Nicholas Hansen from Harvard. He would like to ask you at which point or at what point will the Communist Party or MOFA move away from a move warrior approach because it proves ineffective at achieving the party's foreign policy goals and shift back towards a more disciplined approach. You outlined as appropriate, for example, dealing with Australia in a better way or employing both strategies simultaneously. Yeah. It's a question that people here in Washington are asking very frequently. And I think it's something that puzzles a lot of longtime China watches. Because as you say, in the past, there has been this kind of pattern of overreach and then course correction in Chinese foreign policy. And sometimes it's taken a long time. And sometimes it's kind of come out of nowhere. I think very, very few people outside of China's top leadership really could have predicted the opening to the US in the early 1970s. And I'm sure that the kind of two-decade run after Tiananmen after 1989 would have been predicted by very many either. But this time, the assertive turn has gone on for a long time. And China watches are kind of wondering, well, how much longer will this be allowed to run before there's some kind of course correction? I think a lot of people thought, perhaps, hoped that those remarks by Xi Jinping to a Politburo study session, which I mentioned earlier, where he talked about the need for China to create a lovable image and a respected image in the world. People hoped that that might be the start of a course correction. And I know there's work being done at University College Dublin at the moment to kind of compare the tweets that were sent out before Xi's remarks and then the tweets that were sent out afterwards. So they're digging into whether there really has been a difference. But anecdotally, and based on interviews that I've done, I don't see very much difference in the tone. Actually, the week after Xi Jinping's announcement that he wanted a more lovable image for China, a Chinese diplomat posted an image of an extended middle finger with a caption that said something like, this is how China will treat its critics, which kind of suggested that there wasn't too much shift that was going on. And I don't think we've seen much softening of the tone in recent months, with perhaps the small exception of Yang Jiechi's recent meeting with Jake Sullivan in Switzerland. And I think the reason fundamentally that we haven't seen a recalibration is that Xi Jinping likes the assertive tone. He thinks that China should be respected and should be afforded a central role in international politics and shouldn't have to make compromises to foreigners who, he said it in a 2008 speech, he disliked foreigners who have full bellies and have nothing to do but point fingers at the PRC. He disliked it then. He disliked it now. And China's economy is now more than twice as big as it was when he said that. And I think there's also another sort of really crucial element here, which is that Xi's remarks in that Politburo study session were aimed at improving the way that China tells its story, but they didn't suggest for a moment that Xi Jinping wants to change the policies which have led in large part to this backlash. Wolf Warrior diplomacy hasn't taken place in a vacuum. It's taken place as part of a much bigger policy environment which has seen Western multinational companies alienated by China's industrial policies. It's seen foreign militaries grow alarmed by China's activities in the South China Sea, human rights activists alarmed by crackdowns in Xinjiang and Hong Kong. And the list goes on and on. And President Xi gave no indication that he wants to change those policies which have led to the backlash. And I think he's given very little indication that he wants to change the messaging and communication either. And so I'm not expecting a recalibration in the short term for that reason. We have asked a few questions which are generally about Wolf Warrior diplomacy. Let me now switch track to ask a couple of questions from the audience which are more specific. And then we can come back to the more general. This question, I pick next comes from Jonathan Fenby who is a research associate at SOAST. And he would like you to focus on China's diplomacy in international organizations. How does the Wolf Warrior style go down at the United Nations and other international organizations? Yeah, or in this, is China following a Wolf Warrior approach at the UN? Well, thank you, Jonathan, who is of course one of the UK's most eminent China watches. So I'm very grateful that he's tuned in. Yeah, I mean, we certainly have seen some displays of Wolf Warrior diplomacy in international organizations. I would say on the whole, China's approach in those, China has this view that international organizations are a prime way for it to increase its influence on the international stage. And in many, many forums, the behavior of Chinese envoys remains highly professional and sophisticated in international organizations. So I wouldn't want to give a misleading opinion, but there have been cases of, I think at the UN in Geneva of Chinese diplomats literally banging on the table to drown out the noise of speakers who criticized the PRC's human rights record. And there have also been some extremely barbed remarks by Chinese diplomats at the United Nations in New York. So there have been some displays, I think that would qualify as Wolf Warrior diplomacy. But for me, kind of stepping back a little bit, the more notable thing is that while the United States was busy leaving the World Health Organization and trying to cut funding for multilateral organizations, China was busy building influence on the inside. So yes, Wolf Warrior diplomacy. Yes, those tactics have gone badly when they've happened, but actually the biggest story is that the PRC has been engaged in building influence while the US has been, until very recently at least, has been kind of disengaged and pretty hostile to those forums. Are you saying that the Chinese are using Wolf Warrior approach at the UN and being successful, or the Chinese are using a different style of diplomacy at the UN and are being successful? I would say, I mean, it's a mix of the two. I would say though, primarily Chinese behavior at the UN and most multilateral organizations has continued to be pretty professional and constructive with a few high profile examples of Wolf Warrior diplomacy. Yeah. And the success is actually built into A or B. The Chinese diplomats are most effective when they're guided by their expertise and conduct themselves in ways that do not reflect Wolf Warrior diplomacy. I think Chinese engagement in multilateral institutions has been an incredibly steep learning curve which ramped up after the 80s and 90s. And the foreign ministry had zero expertise on non-proliferation, zero expertise on climate change, found itself really struggling to engage at the G20, for example, on financial issues. And it still does struggle a little bit and it's been a lot, with very little influence in international standards making bodies and those kinds of forums and has been on this extraordinary learning curve to build up its expertise in those forums. And I think beneath the surface, some of the theatrics that take place on the surface, its behavior remains pretty constructive. Okay. The next question, also a more specific one, comes from another very distinguished journalist who is a resource associate at SOAS, that's John Gittings. With your knowledge of North Korea, how would you compare the behavior of Beijing's and Pyongyang's diplomats today in the context of the political culture of old regimes? Yeah, it's a great question. I don't, and I wanna make sure that I stay within the bounds of what I know and don't stray into making things up. I think the big similarity on the surface is the use of the body system, is the fact that the North Korean diplomats uniformly move around in pairs and Chinese diplomats almost always do. There was a period in the 1990s and the 2000s when Chinese diplomats would sometimes break that rule and would meet with people one-on-one, but under Xi, that system has been implemented with a new zeal and so those kind of elements of the system are very, very similar. I don't have great expertise on North Korea's diplomatic core and so I wouldn't wanna draw kind of too many comparisons for fear of getting things wrong, but I guess just the other observation that I would offer would be that the Soviet Union in many ways provided a model for both the PRC's diplomacy and North Korea's and in China's case at least, there was a very, very conscious learning process that happened so some of China's very first diplomats posted overseas of course went to Moscow and then they went to other Warsaw Pact countries and they were sent out with the explicit mission of gathering information on how do you build a diplomatic service, what does an embassy do, what does the political section versus the cultural section do and all of these kind of how does international law work, how does diplomatic community work, all of these very basic things and the Chinese Embassy in Moscow actually sent back notebooks and it sent back telegrams which worked to Beijing with the lessons that they had garnered from their Soviet counterparts and they were used to create a textbook in Beijing which trained Chinese diplomats and so I assume that many of the similarities which might be there would stem from the fact that both were based around this kind of Leninist system from very early stage but it's also important to kind of say that for whatever similarities there are I'm sure that there are also manifold differences that the fact that the Chinese envoys as well their behavior is quite tightly controlled when they study overseas they are able to study overseas Wang Yi, the foreign minister studied at Georgetown Yang Jiechi, the top diplomat studied at the University of Bath from the London School of Economics these things are kind of unthinkable in a system I believe unthinkable in a system like North Korea's and so while there are some systemic similarities there are also just crucial differences based on the fact that China has gone through 40 years of reform and opening and North Korea hasn't. Okay, thank you. The next question I picked partly because it comes from a current student at SOAS and that is Jess Han. To what extent do you think the new aggressive foreign policy rhetoric is derived from a new sense of confidence and or a sense that China is not being sufficiently respected by the Western countries? Yeah, thank you, Jess I think it was. That's, yeah, it's an important question. I think the answer is both. I think it comes from confidence and it comes from worry and insecurity. Both of those things coexist in the PRC political system and in the PRC foreign ministry. I kind of gave some examples of the response to the global financial crisis, the COVID outbreak where Chinese leaders felt like their system had been vindicated and that they should have an increased degree of confidence in the world and these things exist alongside insecurities as I said and your question kind of picked up on this idea of respect and I think that that's really crucial. It's actually something that has kind of been part, this looking for whether the PRC is being respected and whether it's diplomats are being respected is something that has been part of the foreign ministry's culture really for the seven decades of its existence. You know, the first generation of Chinese diplomats and actually the first few generations of Chinese diplomats all had lived experiences of national humiliation. One of China's ambassadors to Paris, Wu Jianmin found himself that he was playing as a kid outside the Chinese embassy in Nanjing and had a dog, I said the French embassy in Nanjing and had a dog set on him just for playing there and ended up China's ambassador in Paris and had this great sense that he had come from this weak impoverished place which was now stronger and deserved respect and so from the very outset Chinese diplomats were instructed to look for signs of respect and they've been sensitive to it ever since, you ask US diplomats who actually dealt with them in the 90s they were extremely prickly on any occasion when they felt that the PRC wasn't being treated as an equal. Xi Jinping's new approach to international diplomacy and great power diplomacy stresses this idea that the two sides must interact as equals which also I think stems from that longer tradition and I assume that some of what your question is getting at is whether the kind of wolf warrior tactics have been driven by a perception that China is not getting the respect it deserves and in some important ways it has. So Mike Pompeo, the former US Secretary of State we've repeatedly called into question the Communist Party's ruling legitimacy would hurl insults at China which kind of went even beyond what President Trump was willing to say and the Chinese foreign ministry responded with extraordinary personal attacks and vitriol which I've never really seen it level at any other one individual and I think that those instances of wolf warrior diplomacy owed a lot to the idea that China wasn't being sufficiently respected. I think in other cases where the PRC has the PRC is clearly less under attack and less threatened the cases of wolf warrior diplomacy in Papua New Guinea and Fiji and Venezuela and other places it's kind of hard to see it coming from that place it comes I think more from a feeling that we're strong and we're gonna tell you the way that we should be treated and you will follow because we're strong. I hope that answers the question. I think that contrast certainly very helpful but kind of a logical follow up is how much more respect can a country asked to receive apart from being a little holding member of the permanent member of the UN Security Council with higher representation that UN agencies than any other powers. What way it takes? What more? Yeah, so I guess kind of a few things come to mind. First off, I think that there is this misperception in Beijing or kind of selective view that some people in Beijing have about what it means to be a great power. In my mind, I grew up in Britain in the 90s and 2000s and was a teenager when the Iraq invasion was going on and in my mind, being a great power means that you're subjected to constant criticism. The US at its zenith, the zenith of its international power was widely disparaged and criticized in Europe and I think to a large extent the more powerful you become the more susceptible to criticism you also are and I've often been struck by the fact that the Chinese leaders and Chinese diplomats seem to think that the more powerful they become the less subject to criticism they should be whereas in fact, I think it works kind of the opposite way. So some of that comes down to kind of a misperception but when it comes down, you know when you think about specific issues where they believe they're not being respected here's how I think that they would phrase that argument. This is not my opinion but this is how I think they would phrase it. They would say, you know in Li Jiaxin, former Chinese foreign minister's memoir he says that China is unlike any other major power because it has never achieved national unification and its territorial integrity because of Taiwan's continuing separation from mainland rule. So when they see Western countries or any other country extending diplomatic relations with Taiwan or providing it international space or trade agreements or whatever it is they don't just see that as a challenge to their power but they see it as a challenge to China's national respect. They see it as a sign that the other countries think of China as weaker and somehow less deserving of the kind of territorial integrity that other major powers are entitled to that's their perspective on it. I think the other, you know when if you talk to Chinese diplomats about Tibet their perspective is that, you know we don't question whether Alaska is part of the United States. So why are you questioning, you know and why are you talking to separatists in Tibet about Tibet and independence and so I think that, you know in their minds a lot of these issues which for us are just part of the day to day of bilateral ties with China do come down to whether or not China is respected as an equal member of the international system and have of course have their roots in some of these very, very deep set historical issues. The next question I pick kind of pick it because it follows partly on your earlier answer and this come from a student base in London who prefers to be anonymous. And the question is, does wolf warrior diplomacy pay out differently in different regions compared to say between Europe and United States? I think underlying it is perhaps your earlier answer in terms of the Chinese perhaps have a reasons to feel that Pompeo and the US government some US government officials were being rather disrespectful when you actually saw more wolf warrior style of diplomacy in European countries and in South America and in just north of the border from you in Canada where they were much more respectful of China than the United States under the trauma administration worst. Yeah, so this gets some really important nuance around the question of wolf warrior diplomacy. I think there are a couple of different ways you can kind of split the different approaches that China takes. One is kind of weak countries versus strong countries. I think on the whole China tends to be more the greater China perceives a country's power to be the greater China's restraint is, you know it's this way if you talk to people in Washington you would think that the United States had been the primary target of wolf warrior diplomacy and that's not true. If you look at the behavior of Chinese envoys based in Washington to former ambassador, Tsui-Ting Kai, the new ambassador, Qin Gang they're pretty restrained in the way that they express themselves. And I think that stems from the fact that despite all of the differences between Beijing and Washington you have to work with the United States no matter who you are it's still the biggest economy in the world and it has the most powerful military in the world. And so Chinese diplomats conduct themselves with a kind of sense of restraint that just doesn't exist when Chinese envoys are working in Canada or France or Britain, Australia Chinese diplomats have been far, far less restrained and more combative in those places. And I think the primary reason for that is the difference in strength between those countries. So that's kind of one way to split it. I think another way to split it is developed world versus developing. And Wolf Warrior diplomacy has been a feature to a greater or lesser extent of China's diplomacy with most Western countries but I think we've seen very few examples of it to my knowledge in Africa, for example where China seems to have continued with this kind of like other tradition that I talked about of charm offensive diplomacy. And over time, those two approaches have always coexisted and been in different balances and different places and different times. And as far as I know in Africa it's continued in other parts of the developing world in India China has certainly engaged in Wolf Warrior diplomacy. Its consulate in Kolkata has been particularly vocal on Twitter and we've seen just last week a whole series of statements about Taiwan from the Chinese embassy in New Delhi which kind of suggests that harder approach. And I guess probably one of the reasons for that is that China feels like India is ganging up on it with countries like Australia and Japan and the United States and wants to try to discourage that. But I think in fact the PLC's behavior in that case has had exactly the opposite effect and is encouraging India to further cooperate with those countries. So those are kind of two of the ways I divide it up. Okay, since you mentioned Tibet earlier let me bring in a question from a Tibetans who is living in India. Tencent Kuga. Tencent's got two questions. One is how do those people who are living within China view China's Wolf Warrior diplomacy? So I think it focuses on the people. The second question is given your research into this subject do you think China's Wolf Warrior diplomacy is serving the PLC well? Or is it delivering some kind of own goals? Yeah, so the question of whether it's popular is as you all know very, very hard to answer and opinion polling is scarce in China. It's often not reliable when it does exist and it's a nation of 1.4 billion people. So all of those provisos kind of at the outset I think my impression is that it is largely popular. I think most of the Chinese public don't pay just like in America, most of the Chinese public don't pay attention to foreign policy most of the time. So it would be wrong to think that people that the whole of the public was kind of looking out for how its envoys were behaving but there is a very active part of the Chinese public which is very vocal online which does watch very closely the tone that the foreign ministry takes. And in the 90s and 2000s was extremely critical of the way that the foreign ministry behaved and believed that it was being far too soft. There were members of the Chinese public who sent calcium tablets to the foreign ministry in Beijing with the implication that the backbones of Chinese diplomats were too weak and needed to be strengthened. Those people have frequently celebrated some of the outbursts which have become known as will worry diplomacy. And in fact after Yang Jiechi's kind of dressing down of his US counterparts in Alaska in March, there were even t-shirts made and merchandise sold kind of celebrating some of the language that he used. But those people and those instances don't represent the whole of the Chinese public but as far as I can tell, yeah, it's broadly popular with some major detractions from foreign policy elites who would like more focus on winning over global opinion. And I think kind of related to that the second question on whether this is an own goal, I think broadly, yes. I think the way that the one sort of success I can think of for will worry diplomacy is making it kind of amplifies existing strengths in the PRC's approach to diplomacy which is that PRC is very, very good at communicating its bottom line to other countries. It has a clear red line on Taiwan. There's a clear red line on criticizing China about Tibet and so on and so forth. PRC has always been good at communicating those and the wolf warriors have, if there was anyone in any doubt of China's stance on those issues the wolf warriors have certainly helped to clarify things. But on the whole, I don't really see any evidence of it being effective. As I said, it seems to have convinced many people who might have not made up their minds about China's intentions that there's something to worry about with China's rise. It's alienated elites across the West and as I said in many developing countries and I think it's probably increased the costs of China's rise. And it's hard for me to see it is anything but an own goal. Next questions come from the Polish Academy of Sciences, Marta Tomsak. He is a fan of you and he is going to get a copy of your book. Has your research covered the programme of the training of diplomats? Whether it's in the diplomatic training school or in the ministry. He's wondering if this has changed in recent years because what the wolf warrior diplomats are behaving simply are not in line with what Chinese diplomats used to do. Are they being trained? Yeah. So it's a subject that really fascinated me as I was researching the book and you'll see references to the way that Chinese diplomats are trained kind of throughout the book. And as I mentioned, early on there was a stress on methodologies that had been garnered from the Soviet Union and from the communist world. And there was also because the learning curve was so steep, China's first generation of diplomats, many didn't speak foreign languages. Some had never been overseas or even met a foreigner in some cases and lots of the first ambassadors had been previously generals in the People's Liberation Army. So the learning curve for them was extremely steep, not just in kind of the how-to's of diplomacy but the foreign ministry undertook training sessions on things like how do you attend a diplomatic reception? How do you eat with a knife and fork? How do you make small talk at a drinks party? And those kinds of things. And down to the level of like very detailed guidance on like how not to make too much noise as you ate food and those kinds of things. And of course, lots of that stuff has as China has modernized and opened up to the world, lots of that content has been reduced or even completely eliminated. So now the kind of etiquette training that goes on in the foreign ministry is very, very minimal and it has been reduced largely just to a set of guidance rather than to any kind of formal training. At the same time, China's ability to provide linguistic training or subject kind of specialized training has increased dramatically. There was an effort in the late 1950s after the Bandung Conference as China established relationships with the developing world, Joe and Lai put out an instruction saying that capacity for language training should be greatly expanded. And there was this kind of slow and steady move toward professionalism away from that those kind of original rough and ready diplomats to a cadre of very sophisticated and well-trained diplomats over the decades that there were big setbacks. The cultural revolution being the very greatest one but throughout the decades and especially since the 1980s that kind of specialism that's been promoted in the training has just gotten stronger and stronger. I think one of the question marks now is whether the politicization of education in the PRC will impact diplomats training. I think it's too early to tell what impact it will have but there have been some high profile cases of professors at some of the foreign ministries feeder schools getting in trouble for making comments which was seen as too liberal or too pro-western. And so we'll see if there is kind of a shift in Chinese diplomats training that happens on the basis of that but it's early days. Next questions comes from Grace Gao. Besides successfully holding the 2008 summer Olympics China's newfound confidence come mainly from his tremendous economic successes in recent decades. International companies and or businesses have helped to contribute to this rise of China's power and assertiveness. What can the West or the international society do to counter China's aggression? Let me make sure I understand the question correctly. So a lot of the new confidence comes from economics. It's from economics to which we in the West have contributed and helped to build up. Now the question is what can the West or the international society do to deal with it? I think that the increasing answer is that the ability of the outside world to influence China's economic trajectory is quite limited outside of a small number of very strategic sectors where China currently lacks technology. So there are areas for example, semiconductor production, engines for aircraft and a few other sectors where China really does need outside technology and there is quite serious thinking going on here and in many other foreign capitals to try and figure out what measures can be taken to limit China's access to those technologies. But I think a lot of people feel like, President Trump articulated this design to prevent China from making any kind of economic progress which would see it further catch up with the West. And I think it's pretty clear that the Trump administration was not successful in that endeavor. And I don't think there are very many people in Washington who believe that it can be successful on that front simply because the Chinese government's far more in control of its destiny than outsiders are. Okay, we've got five minutes left and there are three questions that I would quite like to fit them in for you, Peter. The first question is a theoretical one from Philip Lim. Have the theoretical underpinnings of China's wolf warrior diplomacy been influenced in any way by Carl Schmitt's friend enemy distinction? I don't know how the Carl Schmitt's thought is undergoing something of a renaissance in the PRC and there's been considerable interest in that topic. I don't know how that feeds into the thinking about wolf warrior diplomacy. I do know that on the theme of friends and enemies that Mao Zedong's thoughts on the difference between friends and enemies and the vital task of distinguishing between the two has been important from the outset and that the foreign ministry and the rest of the Chinese government continues to make distinctions between individuals who are seen as friendly to the outside and those who are seen as hostile to the PRC and I think that certainly that follows in the tradition of Mao's thinking on friends and enemies. I don't know how Schmitt fits into the picture though. Okay, thank you. Second last question from Norman Stockman in Aberdeen in Scotland. Would it helps to bring the reporting of Chinese diplomacy by Western media into the analysis? Quiet professional constructive diplomacy is not news. Whereas a wolf warrior outburst is news. So the question is, is it real or is it just Western reporting? Yeah, it's an important question and of course like no one wants to write the dog bites man story, right? You want to write the man bites dog story but this is not just a matter of media reporting. It's a matter of talking to Western diplomats, foreign diplomats who have spent decades engaging with the PRC and have witnessed a dramatic change in the behavior of Chinese diplomats not just in public but also in private meetings. And of course also to looking at the warnings of many Chinese foreign policy scholars and former Chinese diplomats who are alarmed at the direction that Chinese diplomacy has taken. So it's always a good idea to keep a check on media reporting and media priorities but I think the evidence for it just extends so much further beyond that that we can be pretty assured that it's a real phenomenon. Very last question, not specifically about Wolf Warriors but about Chinese diplomacy nonetheless is from Shantanud Noida. What is your views about the BLI? Is it going to be successful in African countries because of the frequency of coups in Africa? The frequency of what in Africa? What are the details? So I think that the BLI in many ways represents some of the PRC's greatest strengths when it comes to diplomacy which is not the ability to persuade people through words but the ability to persuade people through incentives and inducements. And on that front, China I think has been much more successful than the US has. Much of the US's appeal comes from its values and comes from the security blanket that it extends to other countries and much of China's appeal comes from its economic goods and you see that with the BRI. And there have been stumbles in recent years whose being among them, this problem of providing continuity between in recipient countries but I think by and large the appeal is pretty strong and it's kind of the flip side of Wolf Warrior diplomacy. Well, with that, I will have to draw these webinars to a close. We are bang on at 6.30 London time. Thank you very much Peter Martin for a very thought provoking webinar. I think it's the range and the depth of the questions shows how much interest you have generated. Thank you to you and thank you to all of you who have taken part in this webinar whether you ask a question or state silently. I look forward to seeing some more of you at the webinar next week. Thank you very much. Thank you and goodbye.