Do China’s leaders care about what foreigners say about the country?

Yes and no. China still craves international endorsement, but believes it is no longer the humble apprentice who used to learn from the masters in the West
Rather than try to change the English-language international media’s echo chamber, Chinese officials are busy constructing an echo chamber of their own

Wang Xiangwei

Published: 9:30am, 18 Dec 2021

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Do China’s leaders still care what foreigners say about the country? Do they get it that Beijing’s aggressive approach to its changing international environment has lost it friends and stoked disapproval in many parts of the world?

Those are typical questions I receive from foreign friends inside and outside China, who genuinely care about the country and worry about what they see as a constant hammering of its reputation, sometimes self-inflicted.

The answer is: yes and no. As mentioned in this space last week, China’s leaders have developed a sophisticated internal reference system to stay informed of the latest developments at home and abroad. At a time when the leadership crows about how today’s China is closer to the centre of the world stage than at any other time in history, they crave international endorsement. Every time China announces a major policy or holds a key political event, the state media busies itself reaching out to foreign officials and analysts to sing praises even though the pool of commentators appears small, often from Russia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Cuba.

Chinese President Xi Jinping. Photo: Xinhua

In June, President Xi Jinping publicly urged senior officials to craft a “credible, lovable and respectable” image for the country, a line he repeated at a major conference of writers and artists in Beijing on Tuesday.

But that is not how people outside the country feel. China’s wolf warrior diplomats respond aggressively to foreign government officials or individuals who challenge Beijing’s narratives on sensitive issues; the state media pushes back strongly against critical reports in the overseas media and labels them as anti-China; the nationalistic online warriors within China go after anyone who tries to present views different from the official line as unpatriotic or appeasing to the West.

The fight is nowhere more intense than in China’s open confrontation with the United States over ideology and values. When US President Joe Biden convened a virtual Summit for Democracy this month, Beijing released a series of documents in an attempt to show that China is more democratic than America.

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Put simply, China gives an impression that it brooks no criticism from anyone, constructive or otherwise.

There are a myriad of reasons behind China’s momentous shift in its approach and rhetoric to its foreign relationships. One important one is that China believes it is no longer the humble apprentice who used to learn from the masters in the West.

In the early years of China’s reform and opening up, Deng Xiaoping reportedly said that China should be on good terms with the US simply because those countries which followed the US had all developed well.

Chris Patten, the last governor of colonial Hong Kong, receives the Union flag after it was lowered for the last time at Government House in 1997. Photo: AFP

In the era of Hu Jintao, who was the president and Communist Party chief from 2002 to 2013, Chinese officials were very open to different ideas, even from their harshest critics and foes. Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last colonial governor, who was once condemned by a senior Chinese official as “a sinner for 1,000 years” was invited to speak at the Communist Party’s Central Party School, the institution that trains high-ranking cadres.

Even as late as 2017, the Chinese government invited Steve Bannon, a former senior adviser to the then US president Donald Trump, to meet Wang Qishan, then China’s top anti-corruption tsar and now the vice-president. Among other things, Bannon was seen as a major driver of anti-China sentiment while in the White House.

Those days of interactions now seem like a distant memory. Beijing has doubled down on its pugnacious approach ever since Trump launched a trade war against China in 2018 and China hawks in his administration started to talk up China as an existential threat to the US-led international order, unleashing a host of measures aimed at holding back China’s growth.

At the first high-level meeting between Beijing and the Biden administration in Alaska in March, China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi publicly rebuked the US for not being qualified to “speak from a position of strength”.

China’s top diplomat Yang Jiechi meets US Secretary of State Antony Blinken in Alaska. Photo: TNS

Xi and other senior officials have used multiple occasions to stress that Beijing no longer accepts sanctimonious preaching from the so-called masters (read: the US and its Western allies) who feel they have the right to lecture China.

In particular, Chinese officials now see a dysfunctional US which is politically, racially and culturally divided, characterised by the fact that Trump and a large number of his Republican supporters refuse to accept the presidential election results and by Washington’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which has already resulted in more than 800,000 American deaths. What’s more, the US invasions of countries like Iraq and Afghanistan, aimed at regime changes, have ended in catastrophic failures with serious human rights violations.

As China plays a long game, Xi has publicly said that time and momentum are on China’s side, indicating an intention to hunker down for a protracted struggle with a declining but still potent US. Meanwhile, other senior officials have openly talked up a supposedly inevitable trend of East rising and the West declining.

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Their optimism is apparently based on the belief that so long as China focuses on its own priorities to ensure its GDP surpasses that of the US to become the world’s largest economy by the end of the decade, the rest of the world will see China differently as its own position of strength improves.

Meanwhile, Chinese officials no longer court the English-language international media dominated by the US and other Western media companies. Back in the old days, Deng and Jiang Zemin, the former president, agreed to answer tough questions from Mike Wallace for the US television news programme 60 Minutes. Nowadays, China’s officials appear resigned to the fact that whatever they say to the Western media will be distorted and those media outlets cannot be trusted. From the Chinese perspective, the Western media perpetuates a simplistic message that China is autocratic, it cheats on intellectual property, it violates human rights, and it does not honour international commitments. Thus China is bad and the West must fight. Nevermind that China has done so many things right, in the process becoming the world’s second largest economy, the world’s largest trading power, and the world’s largest recipient of foreign direct investment as well as eradicating absolute poverty. Given the pervasive power and reach of the English-language international media, the narrative of “free versus not free” resonates so easily and effectively in such an echo chamber that it is very hard to change it.

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Instead, Chinese officials are busy constructing an echo chamber of their own. This month, China held its annual Understanding China Conference in Guangzhou, a premier forum aimed at helping the international community to better understand China’s domestic and international strategies. But it merely succeeded in preaching to the choir as the list of foreign attendees is carefully vetted and overseas journalists – including those from the South China Morning Post – were denied press credentials to cover the event.

To be sure, China has not quit its efforts to sway international opinions, particularly in developing countries, as it positions itself as the champion of multilateralism and free trade. For instance, China has sent billions of vaccine doses to the African and Arab countries – where Chinese media have beefed up their operations – and has promised to encourage more exports from those countries.

Back to the very first question at the beginning of this piece, Chinese officials care what foreigners say about China so long as they say nice things. In a perverse way, the US and its Western allies do the same thing. These days, any individual who says anything nice about China is called a panda hugger or worse. Just ask Ray Dalio, the legendary founder of the investment management firm Bridgewater Associates who became embroiled in controversy after he compared China to a “strict parent” when asked about the disappearance of dissidents, or Jeffery Sachs, Columbia University economics professor, who was forced to close his Twitter account in 2019 after he received vitriolic attacks for accusing the US of hypocrisy in seeking the extradition of Meng Wanzhou of Huawei.

Wang Xiangwei is a former editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post. He is now based in Beijing as editorial adviser to the paper

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