The appointment of a new diplomatic supremo for Europe sends a harsh message on Beijing’s next steps.
When the president of the European Commission, Ursula Von Der Leyen, told an audience at Davos that Europe and China should “find solutions” to matters of mutual interest, it is unlikely that she had more “wolf warrior” diplomacy in mind.
Yet it is President Xi Jinping of China who has set the tone for his country’s interaction with the Europeans through an appointment that is as shrewd as it is provocative.
He has chosen the foreign ministry’s most abrasive “warrior,” Lu Shaye, as special representative to Europe. Lu, 60, has just finished a five-year stint as ambassador to France, where Le Figaro characterized him, with some restraint, as a “habitué des polemiques”, or one habituated to controversy.
The post is doubly important within the Chinese bureaucracy because it gives the holder an almost unlimited scope to operate across portfolios from the Ukraine war to tariffs on electric vehicles.
In the hands of a man with direct access to Xi, and enjoying the leader’s confidence, the envoy in effect outranks every other Chinese diplomat from the Atlantic to the Urals. Moreover, Lu will be based in Beijing, where he will be close to the circle of courtiers around Xi, who is now routinely referred to as “The Core” of the nation.
While he can leave others to haggle into the Belgian night over sheets of statistics and quotas, Lu will be able to range freely and respond to what China deems to be the most pressing business of the day.
His role was accurately summed up by the foreign ministry spokesman, Guo Jiakun, who said he will handle communication and coordination with his European counterparts “according to the wishes and needs of the Chinese government.”
That speaks volumes for the trust in which he is held by the supreme ruler, who has already purged one foreign minister and keeps the present incumbent, a dour time-server named Wang Yi, on a tight leash.
The new envoy is also an astute choice because he is a proficient French speaker, with stints in Senegal and as ambassador to Canada on his resumé. His fluency in the language of Moliere did not, however, endear him to the French audience during his assignment in Paris.
Lu enjoyed the distinction of being the first Chinese ambassador summoned to the Quai d’Orsay for a dressing down since one of his predecessors was called in after the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989.
With no small irony, one cause for complaint was his unsubstantiated claim that during the Covid-19 pandemic care workers in France abandoned their posts, leaving their charges to die of hunger and illness.
Since Lu had served as deputy mayor of Wuhan, where the pandemic broke out, it drew attention to the debate over the origins of Covid-19 and the Chinese government’s handling of the outbreak.
There were further polemiques over Lu’s characterization of critics as “mad hyenas” and his claim that people from China’s Uyghur Muslim minority were “not interned in detention camps but placed in educational and training centers.”
He capped his role as the undiplomatic diplomat with a French television interview after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in which he observed that the post-Soviet states had “no effective status under international law.”
If this both bewildered and enraged those post-Soviet nations thinking they enjoyed mutual recognition and diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic (for example, China formally recognizes the borders of Ukraine), well, too bad.
It is safe to say that none of these things counted as indiscretions in the eyes of Lu’s master in Beijing, nor among the coterie of Chinese diplomats — not necessarily all of them — who seem to think that they are re-living the 1930s and that the methods of a Molotov or a Ribbentrop are apt for the hour.
The French Sinologist Emmanuel Lincot was quoted by Le Figaro as saying that Lu was “a pure product of the rule of Xi Jinping which heralded a radical change of posture adopted by Chinese diplomats.
“He is the symptom of a diplomacy that is totally subject to the ideology of the party and its neo-imperial vision.”
He is also a product of Xi Jinping’s idealized meritocracy. The son of doctors specializing in public health, Liu was born in Nanjing, eastern China, in 1964. He was just old enough to escape the Cultural Revolution and took the unusual course of specializing in French at a university where the Ministry of State Security habitually kept an eye out for high fliers with the skills that China needed as it “opened up.”
A sequence of postings followed, but it was Lu’s domestic stint in Wuhan from 2014 to 2015 that marked him out as a cadre destined for ambitious tasks. China has its modern Mandarin class — the successful former ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming followed a similar path — and he is now at the top of his game.
His new counterparts in the European Union and NATO had better be at the top of theirs.
By Michael Sheridan. Michael Sheridan is the author of The Red Emperor: Xi Jinping and His New China published by Hachette Books in the United States and Headline Press in the UK, andThe Gate to China, an acclaimed history of Hong Kong. Article and pictures first time published on CEPA web page. Prepared for publication by volunteers from the Res Publica - The Center for Civil Resistance.
