Do China’s ‘wolf warrior’ diplomats really have any bite?

The writer is fellow for emerging technologies at the Alliance for Securing Democracy at the German Marshall Fund

As tensions grow between China and the world’s major democracies over human rights abuses in Xinjiang province, Beijing’s “wolf warrior” diplomats have shed their sheep’s clothing and gone on the offensive.

Last month, the US, UK, Canada, and EU enacted targeted sanctions on officials responsible for what the Biden administration has labelled a “genocide” of Uyghur Muslims. Beijing retaliated with a “counterpunch” on European parliamentarians, academics and think tanks, and doubled down on an information counteroffensive to dispel concerns over Xinjiang. But this effort is backfiring in the west, exposing a more shadowy side of Beijing’s foreign policy to public scrutiny.

Chinese officials have increasingly taken to Twitter over the past year in the face of mounting global concern about Xinjiang. That has now gone into overdrive. In just the last week of March, China’s diplomatic and state media accounts tweeted about the province more than 2,000 times — an eight-fold spike in frequency, according to research complied by the Alliance for Securing Democracy, where we track authoritarian social media accounts.

Quantity has not meant quality. The narratives Beijing is pushing are a web of contradictions. One line seeks to justify government actions by citing terrorism in the region. Another spouts a clumsy moral equivalence with the west’s human rights record. At the same time, diplomats and state media push the “nothing to see here” narrative, churning out images of the sweeping landscapes of “#AmazingXinjiang” as if to say: “How could something so beautiful be bad?”

So far, this propaganda flood seems to have done a better job of fuelling a backlash than of convincing other governments. As the French foreign trade minister wrote, “It is not by trying to intimidate our parliamentarians, researchers & academics that [China] will respond to legitimate concerns about the treatment of Uyghurs in #Xinjiang”. Beijing’s message rings similarly hollow in other key democracies. Last week, Japan called out China in an uncharacteristically strong statement. And at a bizarre media event in Canberra, the Chinese embassy gauchely paraded Uyghurs in an ill-received video presentation to journalists.

Beijing’s mixed messaging was neatly captured, mid-tweet, recently when the Chinese Embassy in Ireland mangled an Aesop’s fable. In its version of “the Wolf and the Lamb”, China accused the west of wolf-like attacks but then asserted: “The wolf is the wolf, not the lamb. BTW, China is not a lamb.” The real audience is likely to be party politicians back home, who want to see an emboldened China going punch for punch with the west.

This external diplomatic departure from the more sanguine tones of mutual benefit and co-operation that European leaders are accustomed to hearing from China rankles. And it has forced some officials and businesses into tough choices they might rather avoid making publicly, such as whether to support a new investment agreement with China.

China’s coercion has succeeded far better when it has been covert. A 2020 PEN America study on the Beijing government’s influence on Hollywood, for example, found that studios and filmmakers change “casting, plot, dialogue and settings . . . to avoid antagonising Chinese officials” who control whether their films gain access to the booming Chinese market.

For democracies, activists, researchers and those concerned about the fate of the more than 1m imprisoned Uyghur Muslims, all this means meeting Beijing’s bluster with a continued spotlight and an open megaphone. As the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics draw closer, and debates grow louder over whether and how democracies should participate, there may be just such an opportunity.