The endless frustration of Chinese diplomacy Analysis by Foreign Policy

The Foreign Policy magazine has published an article arguing that Beijing’s representatives are always scared they could be the next to vanish. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

Jorge Guajardo’s first mission as Mexico’s new ambassador to Beijing was dealing with the fentanyl crisis. It was 2007, and the United States’ growing fentanyl addiction was already fueling Mexico’s organized crime, with groups using precursor chemicals smuggled from China. “We never got any traction with that,” Guajardo said. “[Chinese officials] didn’t understand, or they pretended not to understand.”

It wasn’t until Mexico hosted the G-20 in 2012, when then-Mexican President Felipe Calderón raised the issue directly with his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, that the country’s concerns were finally heard. After the summit, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs reached out to Guajardo’s team to ask for meetings on the issue—five years after his first efforts.

For Guajardo, now in the private sector, the episode was a typical example of how Chinese diplomats worked. “It’s a one-way channel. [Chinese diplomats] come to you with messages they want to relate to you, but anything you want to relate to them, they just either ignore or don’t know what to do with that information. So it becomes unimportant to them.” He believes that Hu had never been informed about the issue earlier, and only when Calderón was able to directly reach him did the order to do something come down from the top.

It’s an all-too-typical experience for outsiders trying to deal with China’s bureaucratic, opaque, and oftentimes defensive diplomats.

Traditionally, diplomats are supposed to represent their nation—but also to build bridges between countries, especially over difficult issues. They maintain communication channels and find fudges to resolve seemingly intractable differences of position. This doesn’t seem to be the case for Chinese diplomats, whose role is more to “keep foreigners away from Chinese policymakers,” said John Gerson, a former advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on China. “It’s a moat.” Their role is to protect and bolster an authoritarian regime keen for the world’s approval but unable to take any approbation.

In many ways, the patterns of Chinese diplomacy have changed remarkably little since the decades it was run out of Yanan, the mountain headquarters of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It has the same military discipline, fierce loyalty, and underlying defensiveness. As journalist Peter Martin writes in China’s Civilian Army, the Chinese diplomatic service had been “set up to help a closed and paranoid political system cope with a more open outside world.”

That results in diplomats who are valued for their message discipline, their loyalty (to the party), and their diligence. But they are also molded into bureaucrats who have little flexibility or ability to act on their own initiative. International diplomats often complain that it’s difficult, if not impossible, to find any personal rapport with individual Chinese diplomats, especially at the lower levels. “China wants to have two ambassadors. They want to have a Chinese ambassador in Mexico telling Mexicans what China is thinking. And they want a Mexican ambassador in China telling Mexicans what China is thinking,” Guajardo said, quite seriously.

Pavel Slunkin, a former Belarusian diplomat, was on the receiving end of Chinese diplomatic bureaucracy when he worked on President Xi Jinping’s visit to Minsk in 2015. He was used to state visits taking two weeks to arrange—Xi’s took two months of meeting after meeting. The peak of the box-ticking exercise came when the new director of protocol at the foreign ministry demanded, at 2 a.m., a final check of the Great Patriotic War Museum before Xi was due to visit the next day.

For Slunkin, this was a revealing instance of fearful diplomats who needed to please their bosses. It is “the tradition of dictatorships, when they want to make bosses happy and everyone has their own boss. … And they are competing to show how good and efficient they are on every single level. And that’s why sometimes stupid ideas appear, sometimes absolutely unusual things appear. It doesn’t mean that Xi Jinping wants them to do that,” he said.

The director of protocol with whom Slunkin dealt was a rising star named Qin Gang, who later rose to become foreign minister for just seven months before mysteriously disappearing, and being removed from office, this year. The same just happened to China’s defense minister, Li Shangfu, now missing for several weeks and reportedly removed from office. For Chinese diplomats, it’s not just good office politics to impress your seniors. The foreign ministry has been subjected to periodic political campaigns and tests of loyalty from its earliest days. Diplomats learn that their domestic audience is more important than any international one. “Whenever there is a more nationalist, orthodox administration … the foreign ministry is the first suspected agency. That’s where people go to root out traitors,” former U.S. diplomat Susan Thornton told Martin in China’s Civilian Army.

Under Xi, diplomats who are more stridently nationalistic have been rewarded, such as Zhao Lijian, a midranking diplomat posted to Pakistan who became a foreign ministry spokesperson on the back of his fiery tweets defending China. It was soon dubbed “wolf warrior” diplomacy, after a series of Rambo-esque nationalistic movies.

One senior European diplomat who asked for anonymity and who was posted to Beijing in 2017 said Chinese counterparts were quick to retort with counter-accusations if his side ever raised concerns about human rights abuses in China, probably with one eye on their own careers. The example was set from the top: In 2016, Foreign Minister Wang Yi accused a Canadian journalist of “arrogance and prejudice against China” for daring to ask about a Canadian citizen detained in China under allegations of espionage. The exchange went viral in China and was celebrated by nationalists.

The same history prevents ambitious diplomats from getting too close to foreigners, as that proximity could be seen as disloyalty or ideological corruption—especially in periods when China is paranoid about foreign spies. After all, the foreign ministry was created as a new Communist government tried to establish its control over the country and its legitimacy in a largely hostile world. Then-Premier Zhou Enlai spoke about it as being the “People’s Liberation Army in civilian clothing.”

Diplomats were on the front line of the CCP’s global campaign yet also the most prone to outside influence. Even today, they hold foreign counterparts at arm’s length, never engaging socially, and continue to travel in pairs so that each may watch the other. All of this makes personal rapport impossible to build. In his 2008 memoir, Ji Chaozhu, a former diplomat and translator for Mao Zedong, called this professional persona “controlled openness.”

The European diplomat told me how social media made Chinese diplomats easily accessible, at least in theory. They would share their WeChat handles upon first meeting and be reachable via the platform even outside of work hours. Yet any attempt to make the relationship more personal inevitably hit a stone wall. “I never knew where they lived or anything about their personal lives,” the diplomat said. Guajardo had a similar experience, once inviting an assistant minister at the foreign ministry to the Beijing Jockey Club, hoping for a more sociable chat. The minister turned up with two note-taking aides.

The exception to this is high-level negotiations, where the Chinese leadership has more power to act on their own initiative and a proven ability to turn on the charm. In the 1980s, Richard Solomon of the Rand Corp., who had worked on China at the U.S. National Security Council, wrote a report for U.S. intelligence agencies on why Chinese negotiations of the preceding years had been so successful for Beijing. He found that China had a well-established playbook, the most “distinctive characteristic” of which was the cultivation of personal relationships.

Beijing would establish a relationship with a “friendly” official in the U.S. administration, charming them through banquets and flattery. It would call them an “old friend” of China but use that label as a method of emotional blackmail when needed. “They manipulate feelings of goodwill, obligation, guilt or dependence to achieve their negotiating objectives,” Solomon wrote in the report, which was marked as “Secret” at the time. He identified Henry Kissinger as one of China’s targets, quoting him as saying “after a dinner of Peking duck, I’ll sign anything.”

James Mann, who fought to have the report declassified in the ’90s when he was a Los Angeles Times reporter, said he sees much of the same patterns in today’s negotiations. “A senior American official will be told he or she is, if not a ‘friend of China,’ then at least someone who really ‘understands China,’ as other Americans supposedly do not. China can then send messages through that official, expecting the official to relay them in Washington to try to resolve bureaucratic disputes. My own guess right now is that China is seeking to cultivate Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo as its key interlocutor.”

Measuring the success of diplomacy is tough, especially for the mundane conversations that happen between governments every day. While the Chinese method is often infuriating for foreign diplomats, and there is a real risk that Communist leaders are too shielded from outside information, limiting their ability to make perfect decisions, it is not easy to write it off as ineffective. The senior European diplomat said the Chinese adherence to protocol set helpful boundaries—for example, ahead of a leader-to-leader phone call, the Chinese always tested the line three times (24 hours before the call, one hour before, and 15 minutes before).

Using WeChat also meant that diplomats were always available. Finally, Chinese diplomats always stay on message, sometimes obstinately, whether it’s in drafting communiques or negotiating new agreements. That can pay off. After all, it was China’s perceived success in negotiation that necessitated the Rand report.

It seems that when Beijing knows what it wants, it can also be flexible enough to let foreigners in. Deborah Seligsohn, a former U.S. foreign service officer who worked in Beijing on and off for 18 years, said she had no problem meeting with Chinese departments outside of the foreign ministry on issues such as new health and science agreements. “The U.S. CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] was instrumental in helping the Chinese CDC come into being,” she said. “I do think the Chinese government was treating different countries differently depending on what they could get out of it.”

This contrasts with other diplomats’ experiences of being stonewalled by the foreign ministry when trying to meet other Chinese government departments. At one point, Seligsohn recounted, nobody (on the Chinese side) even told the foreign ministry about a new American scientist being posted to Beijing as part of an agency-to-agency agreement between the United States and China. His visa was eventually granted after four months.

More potentially damaging is Chinese diplomacy’s aggressive tilt under Xi. As China’s foreign policy became more assertive and the world reeled from a pandemic worsened by China’s slow initial response, belligerent diplomats didn’t endear Beijing to anyone. A Pew Research Center poll published in July found that a median of 76 per cent of adults surveyed across 24 countries did not think China takes the interests of other countries into account in its own foreign policy; Pew also found that China’s popularity in a number of advanced economies had fallen precipitously under Xi.

Wolf warrior diplomacy also represented a departure from former leader Deng Xiaoping’s tao guang yang hui approach. Roughly translated as “hide your ability and bide your time,” it was a philosophy that served the CCP well in the years after the Tiananmen Square protests. Gerson thinks the switch was a miscalculation: Just as Beijing had been quietly gaining on the U.S. lead, it started boldly advertising its own progress. “So what did President [Donald] Trump do? He pushed China back down.”

But Xi seems deeply committed to this approach and is unlikely to ditch it. As long as the brittle mood continues in Beijing, with officials, including Qin, purged on a regular basis, diplomats are likely to take the safest option: pandering to nationalism and avoiding contact with foreigners. It’s a structure where discipline is valued more than personal charm, where the goal is to defend the CCP through steadfast message discipline rather than winning hearts and minds—however many diplomatic counterparts you drive crazy on the way.