Telling the story of the PRC's diplomatic cadres from 1949 to the present, China's Civilian Army offers fundamental insights into a key puzzle in China's contemporary foreign policy. Based on interviews with Chinese diplomats and a largely untapped reservoir of their historical memoirs, Peter Martin shows how China's bellicose and at times seemingly counterproductive diplomacy is a function of its domestic politics. “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” is explained as a product of diplomats’ efforts to survive and thrive as part of a system that increasingly demands performances of unquestioning loyalty and unwavering ideological orthodoxy over policy pragmatism or personal initiative. The case is coherent and intuitive, and certainly helps advance understanding of the phenomenon. Yet the book's original empirical materials also suggest diplomats’ personal convictions and political beliefs have been at least as important as domestic political exigency.
China's Civilian Army corrects a tendency in Chinese foreign policy studies to write off the importance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs due to its low institutional standing in (what little is known of) the PRC's policymaking process. As Martin argues, given the severe limits on foreign engagement across other parts of the PRC Party-state, and fetters on civil society and cultural industries, the MFA's cadres have been more central to the country's foreign relations than diplomats of many other countries (pp. 4–5). Politically constrained and generally lacking any authority to make policy decisions, they have built a record of disciplined, high-volume messaging, not merely asserting the Party-state's idiosyncratic and sometimes indefensible political and policy lines, but performing them.
A key strength of the book is its detailed contextualization of various recent trends in PRC diplomacy, drawing links between past and present touchstones since 1949. Together with its simple chronological organization and readability, this feature will make it a useful teaching and reference resource for courses on Chinese foreign policy. Formative episodes, such as the Geneva and Bandung Conferences, narrated with first-hand insights from participants, presage the “charm offensives” of the 1990s and early 2000s, as well as Beijing's current focus on the developing world under the “Belt and Road” label. The book also provides humanizing, inside-out perspectives on the impact on PRC diplomacy of seminal events like the Great Leap Forward, the Sino-Soviet Split, the Cultural Revolution, China's rapprochement with the US, the June 4th Massacre in Beijing, and the 2008 Beijing Olympics and global financial crisis.
Martin demonstrates that the frequently un-diplomatic posturing of the Xi era is by no means unprecedented – and nor has it been reserved for the capitalist West. Yang Jiechi's famous walk-out at the 2010 ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF) recalls instructions for handling criticism that were given to PRC envoys in Cuba in the 1960s after the Sino-Soviet split (p. 92). The wide-ranging diatribe Yang delivered when he rejoined the meeting after an hour-long absence, meanwhile, echoes the finger-wagging vituperation of Wu Xiuquan at the United Nations’ temporary headquarters on Long Island in 1950 (p. 62) or Ambassador Li Zhaoxing in the wake of the NATO bombing of the PRC's Belgrade embassy (pp. 165–167). While Ambassador to Sweden Gui Congyou warned in 2019 that “we treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns,” there is as yet no contemporary analogue to the PRC diplomat in London in 1967 who confronted protesters outside the PRC embassy with an axe (p. 103).
This long-running catalogue of “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” complicates another standard narrative: that of the MFA as a weak but dovish foreign policy actor. If MFA diplomats have in certain periods been silent or conciliatory, China's Civilian Army shows this to be primarily attributable to their great discipline in implementing the central leadership's strategies, rather than dovish policy preferences. As detailed in chapter three, PRC diplomats have been carefully selected into the ministry for their loyalty to the Party, and trained in controlling their public conduct and messaging to accord with the Party centre's intentions. Moreover, in recent years, signs have emerged that the ministry's institutional fortunes have been on the rise – most conspicuously in the form of Yang's elevation to the Politburo in 2017. Martin's book demonstrates that the MFA has long had its fair share of foreign policy hawks, and some of them are doing rather well for themselves in Xi's era of PRC power.
The book's argument for the primary importance of domestic political audiences in understanding PRC diplomats’ conduct, however, may be underplaying the impact of ideological beliefs. If, as Martin shows, cadres are steeped in the narratives of China's historical humiliation at the hands of foreign imperialists, and believe the US-led capitalist world to be in inexorable decline, then harsh rhetorical offensives against China's adversaries could in many situations seem both reasonable and strategically advantageous. Similarly, the Party's materialist-dialectical worldview, taking contradictions between clashing forces to be the driving force of all progress, offers rationales for both united-front “charm offensives” and the much blunter goal of building global “discourse power” through sheer volume and polemical intensity. The book's content suggests such historical and ideological beliefs are sufficient to explain many cases of “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” without reference to domestic audiences. Multiple motivations could simultaneously be present, of course, and beliefs can be motivated. Yet rather than the vitriol being artificially concocted, or unleashed contrary to the diplomats’ better judgements, the more common pattern may be one of genuinely held ideological and historical convictions being selectively released in pursuit of international political effects.
The book's general focus on the PRC's domestic politics as the central explanation for its assertive diplomacy is not by any means misplaced. It is, after all, the Party-state system that selects the most loyal, believing cadres into its diplomatic corps, imposes military-style discipline upon them, and demands belief in the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist prophecy of inevitable victory via constant political struggle. As the founding figure of PRC diplomacy Zhou Enlai declared: “Changing from military to diplomatic struggle is simply a matter of changing the front on which one conducts conflict.” With this in view, the PRC's “Wolf Warrior diplomacy” is much less puzzling than it might appear.
