Wolf vs panda: is China at a crossroads over how to spread its global message?
- Media reports censored after professor warned against ‘mirroring internal propaganda in external publicity’, displeasing foreign ministry
- Wolf Warriors have replaced the old ‘panda’ diplomats, but president’s call for ‘credible, lovable and respectable’ style may prompt another shift
China and the US have been at loggerheads on almost all fronts, but with tensions continuing into the Joe Biden presidency, where is the relationship heading? As part of a series taking the temperature of bilateral ties, Minnie Chan looks at what is driving the rise of Wolf Warrior diplomacy in China.
Chu Yin realised very quickly that his comments had displeased the Chinese foreign ministry.
At a seminar in Beijing on July 14, Chu, a professor at the University of International Relations and deputy director of the Centre for China Globalisation (CCG), warned against falling into a trap of “mirroring internal propaganda in external publicity”.
“In the early days, we believed [speaking] good English would help [to tell China’s story],” Chu said. “Now, we are able to use fluent and idiomatic English when telling China stories, but our foreign counterparts don’t understand at all.”
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Chu’s comments were first reported on July 15 by Lianhe Zaobao, a Chinese-language daily newspaper in Singapore, and were widely picked up by local and foreign media outlets in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
But the newspaper deleted the report from its website the next day, after Chu received warnings from a high level that the Chinese foreign ministry was dismayed, according to a journalist at the newspaper. Neither the newspaper nor Chu responded to requests for comment.
Chinese domestic media also removed all follow-up articles about Chu’s comments.
“Chu simply expressed his worries; he wasn’t aware that such normal comments would raise concern and even drag him into trouble,” a friend of Chu said.
Chu made the comments at a seminar to promote a book published by the CCG about how to create new narrative methods for China’s external publicity.
The backlash over his assessment reflects a bigger internal conflict between pandas and wolves in China’s foreign policy community, political analysts say.
In his comments at the seminar, Chu said Beijing had spent heavily shaping its international image, but there were three main problems with the messaging.
He said the approach had led to greater conflict and cultural misinterpretation between China and foreign counterparts; and less professionalism in the story told, making it more difficult to properly convey the leadership’s intended meaning to the outside world. There was also global reputational damage from domestic hawkish opinion leaders on social media.
The incident raised concerns about just how much the “peace-loving panda diplomacy” China has adopted over the years is giving way to Wolf Warrior diplomacy – a term derived from a popular patriotic Chinese action film, Wolf Warrior 2, that depicts a tougher approach by its diplomats in handling China’s relations with other nations.
“The overwhelming influence of Wolf Warrior diplomacy has been consistent with the leadership’s advocacy of a ‘struggle strategy’ that called repeatedly for a ‘dare to fight’ spirit to defend China’s national interests,” said Chen Daoyin, a political commentator and former professor at the Shanghai University of Political Science and Law.
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While observers are divided over whether such an approach causes damage or boosts China’s image, they said the Wolf Warrior approach was gaining dominance because of major changes in China’s relations with other countries, particularly the United States.
Chinese policymakers and observers had once hoped Biden would overturn some of his predecessor’s China policies, such as removing visa restrictions for Chinese. But recent months have seen tensions between the two continue to escalate over matters such as the sanctions, the recent arrival of a military plane in Taiwan and Washington teaming up with allies to send warships to the South China Sea.
“China and the US have entered the stage of great power competition, meaning their ongoing strategic struggles will become long-standing phenomena,” Zhu said. “The increasing hostility has exhausted the presupposed professional humility, mutual respect and trust between the two countries’ high-level diplomats.”
For decades, Beijing adopted two different kinds of messaging for domestic and foreign audiences when promoting the country’s political agendas and image, with instructions that international communication and publicity institutions should use a humble, peaceful tone that was dubbed “panda diplomacy”.
‘Wolf warrior’ diplomacy has a long pedigree in China
In 2009, during the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, Beijing bulked up its huge budget for external publicity to polish the country’s international image. It spent 45 billion yuan (US$7 billion) that year alone on expanding its overseas media organisations.
In the years that followed, Beijing spent an estimated US$10 billion-plus annually supporting its global media network, The Economist reported in 2017, citing a study by George Washington University political scientist David Shambaugh about China’s soft power build-up.
However, the traditional panda diplomacy was replaced by the more aggressive Wolf Warriors when President Xi Jinping announced that China had entered “a new era to build a strong country” at the 19th party congress in 2017.
“The assertive nationalistic public diplomacy of China predated the Trump administration – it has always been there. What changed was the foreign ministry spokespersons became much more outspoken, nationalistic and sarcastic in recent years,” Shambaugh told the South China Morning Post in late July.
The latest public opinion poll announced by the Pew Research Centre on June 30 shows unfavourable views of China among the world’s most advanced economies across North America, Europe and the Asia-Pacific standing at or near record highs, while positive views of the US rebounded after Biden defeated Donald Trump and became US president.
According to the Pew survey that polled almost 19,000 adults in 17 democracies between February and May, confidence in Xi was between 12 and 36 per cent in the 16 countries surveyed – at or near historic lows except in Singapore – compared with Biden’s average of more than 73 per cent.
“China’s spending on ‘external propaganda’, which includes public diplomacy, is largely wasted money. It has not only failed to improve China’s image abroad, it has actually damaged and impaired it,” Shambaugh said.
“Wolf Warrior diplomacy is absolutely not a good approach for China – it is badly tarnishing and damaging China’s international standing and projecting a very negative image. It is not the way a responsible and benign global power should behave.”
In a Communist Party session in late May, Xi called on the party’s top echelon, the Politburo, to come up with better international communication with a more “credible, lovable and respectable” style. Some observers suggested it could herald a calming of the Wolf Warrior tactics.
But Deng Yuwen, a former editor of Study Times who is now a US-based observer, said the advance of Wolf Warrior policy had been encouraged by the ongoing confrontation and competition between Beijing and Washington on all fronts, with the assertive foreign ministry being praised by Chinese patriots when dealing with their American counterparts.
Zhu said China would maintain its Wolf Warrior attitude when dealing with the US, but for other countries, “panda diplomacy should remain in place, or the country will lose more and more friends”.
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Yogesh Gupta, a former Indian ambassador to Denmark and a specialist in China-India relations, said China’s international image had suffered since the advocacy of Wolf Warrior diplomacy.
“As [Chinese] senior leader Deng Xiaoping mentioned, the great powers should lie low and not indulge in verbal abuse and offensive rhetoric. Such behaviour only creates more enemies and spoils your image needlessly,” he said.
Shanghai-based military expert Ni Lexiong said the war philosophy written by Carl von Clausewitz, a well-known Prussian military theorist recommended by both Karl Marx and China’s prominent leader Mao Zedong, might be a useful reference.
“In his book On War, Clausewitz warned that when you are going to get a decisive victory in a war, you should make sure that your political situation will not result in ‘exciting against new enemies’ – that will lead to a fatal defeat,” Ni said.
“The best example is Japan during World War II when it was targeting China, but it provoked another much stronger enemy, the US. The war philosophy could be applied to diplomacy.”