US-China relations are a “zero-sum game where you die and I live”. That was the summation of Qin Gang, China’s fiery new foreign minister, in his first media appearance since starting the role in December.
Qin was speaking at the sidelines of the “two sessions” political meetings in Beijing. But while the parliamentary gathering is primarily concerned with domestic affairs, Qin took the opportunity to lay out China’s strident position on the world stage.
The Biden administration has called for “guardrails” to keep the US-China relationship, which has deteriorated sharply in recent years, from falling into conflict. But for Qin, such an approach is an attempt to stop China from defending itself, which is “just impossible”.
It has been a busy first few months for Qin, who until last year was China’s ambassador to the US. He has defended China over allegations of espionage relating to the spy balloon that floated into the skies over Montana in February. And he has attempted to portray China as a global arbiter for peace, while also remaining firmly committed to supporting Russia in the conflict in Ukraine. On 21 February Qin presented China’s global security initiative which, along with President Xi Jinping’s plan for settling the “Ukraine crisis”, published in the same week, was widely dismissed by analysts as anodyne.
Qin was sent to Washington DC in July 2021, a few months after Joe Biden took office. Some analysts expected the Biden administration to be more conciliatory towards China than Donald Trump had been. But fuelled by a growing bipartisan consensus against China, Biden has hit Chinese technology companies with sanctions and passed export controls to limit Chinese access to semiconductors, in an attempt to slow Beijing’s technological and military advancement.
Biden has also repeatedly said the US would respond militarily to any attempt from China to take over Taiwan by force. That aggravates China, which claims that Taiwan, a self-governing island, should be recognised as part of China’s territory. Qin has been at the coalface of that souring US-China relationship. On Tuesday he responded to a question about Taiwan by reading from a red, leather-bound copy of China’s constitution, which states that Taiwan is part of China.
With a challenging economic outlook caused by three years of zero-Covid policies, China is keen to maintain trade ties with the west. In recent months this had seemed to prompt a recalibration of the aggressive “wolf warrior” diplomacy that had characterised the public statements of Chinese officials during the Covid pandemic. Zhao Lijian, the former foreign ministry spokesperson who in 2020 tweeted a fake picture of an Australian soldier cutting the throat of an Afghan child, was demoted to a maritime agency in January.
Qin’s promotion was initially seen as a step in the same direction. Although he has made combative statements in the past, he is generally considered to be less belligerent than figures like Zhao. And most importantly he is a trusted ally of Xi. In 2016, as a director at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Qin helped Xi to prepare for the G20 summit in Hangzhou.
Qin has insisted that Chinese diplomats are not “wolf warriors” but are merely “dancing with wolves” – that is, they are pushed into defensive positions by western attacks. On Tuesday he reiterated this sentiment: “If faced with jackals and wolves, China has no choice but to face them head on,” he warned.
Little is known about Qin’s personal life, other than the fact that he is married with one son. Born in 1966 in Tianjin, a coastal city in northern China, he is a career diplomat, having joined the diplomatic service in Beijing in his early 20s. Unlike many other members of China’s elite, he does not seem to have studied abroad. He was posted to the UK three times between 1995 and 2011.
But on Tuesday the US was the country that he said he missed. He joked that he liked being labelled a wolf warrior. “Now that I’m back, they don’t describe me as that any more,” he said. That may change after this week.
