In the “Analysis of the Mind” published in 1921, Bertrand Russell, in an attempt to explain the causal relationship between desires and the corresponding bodily motions that are set active by the former, postulates the concept of a “behavior-cycle”, which the philosopher defines as “a series of voluntary or reflex movements of an animal, tending to cause a certain result, and continuing until that result is caused, unless they are interrupted by death, accident, or some new behavior-cycle”. Russell’s postulation was refuted not long after the publication of his book by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and later by Sir Anthony Kenny. All the same, it was the first thing that came into my mind when I read the news that after a rare visit by Milos Vystrcil, president of the Czech Senate, to the Taiwanese legislature in Taipei on September 1, a predictably furious Wang Yi, China’s Foreign Minister, gave a rather strong-worded response during his “fence-mending” visit to Europe. In a joint press conference with his German opposite number, Mr Wang said that the Czech politician’s visit to Taiwan “crossed a red line” for which there would be a “heavy price”.

I wonder if it was a convention – or perhaps an imperative – in a Leninist country to call something or somebody by a name that conveys the exact opposite meaning. In the same way that the Ministry of Truth or the Ministry of Peace works in the fictional state of Oceania in George Orwell’s “Nineteen-Eighty Four”, China calls its foreign minister a “diplomat”, and the latter’s visit to Europe last week a “fence-mending trip”. To put it mildly, Wang Yi, much like his subordinate Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese Ambassador to Britain for the past ten years, is anything but diplomatic. It would be hard to imagine that China’s choice of its foreign minister was not intentional though, for Mr Wang – and for that matter, Mr Liu as well – would hardly be the most diplomatic person (in a non-Orwellian sense) that the Chinese Communist Party could find in a country with a population of over 1.3 billion; if China understood diplomacy in the same way that the rest of the world do, then it surely would not have appointed as its foreign minister somebody whose speech and mannerisms are so uncouth and militant that they could have been that of a low-grade Mafia gangster from the Sicilian countryside.

If China’s choice of its diplomats is indeed a product of careful deliberation, then Bertrand Russell’s theory may be able to shed some light on why Mr Wang could have possibly become his country’s representative on the world’s diplomatic stage. Other than their uncultivated mannerisms and militant speech – and perhaps also their ill-fitted black suits and oily hair – the one defining feature that is shared by Chinese officials, from spokespersons of the Foreign Ministry to Ambassadors, is that they all have multiple “sensitive spots” that can be easily triggered by so much as an obscure allusion to topics that are deemed to be injurious to the Chinese authorities. Words like “Taiwan”, “Xinjiang”, “the Dalai Lama”, and more recently “Hong Kong”, never fail to drive them into a frenzy as though there was an innate “behavior-cycle” that is programmed to turn them in a split second from being some waxwork-like creatures that could have passed themselves off as exhibits in the Madame Tussauds into fanatical androids that are capable of firing attacks with a vocabulary of a Soviet jack-in-office. The prerequisites are absolute obedience, unconditional faith in the leadership, and unquestioning adherence to the party line: Wang Yi makes a good Chinese foreign minister, and so does Liu Xiaoming a good Chinese ambassador, precisely because they are willing to do as they are told and say whatever the party wants them to say, in spite of the fact that some of the things that the party leadership expects them to do or say may not do any good to their own country after all.

In this sense Wang Yi has no one but himself to blame for ruining his supposedly “fence-mending” visit to Europe. In fact the visit was destined to fail from the very start, for no commonsensical man would have expected that the five EU countries that Wang visited would avoid raising the questions of Hong Kong and Xinjiang; leaders and ministers of the five countries could have been reluctant to press Wang on those questions, but given the prominence and the seriousness of the issues, and the general dislike taken by the European electorates to the Chinese state because of the pandemic, it simply would not have been possible for Wang to get away with his fair share of grilling as foreign minister of the country that has been branded as “the exporter of the coronavirus” and “a clear threat to the free world”. If anything, the high expectations of the sojourn, which Chinese state media framed as a “crucial” diplomatic expedition to counter Pompeo’s efforts to sow “hatred” of China around the world, prove just how delusional the Chinese state is.

Mr Wang’s disastrous “fence-mending” visit to Europe demonstrates how the free world can make good use of the multiplying effect that a strong and resolute response to China’s “wolf-warrior diplomacy” could achieve. If more countries would step up and push back against Chinese intimidation, China’s reflexive reaction as a result to go on the offensive could, contrary to what Beijing would hope for, leave it even more isolated. Western democracies should utilize this chink in China’s armour to expose and accentuate the threat that Beijing poses to the free world, and this could very well be one of the contributing factors to the eventual downfall of the Chinese regime.

(Joseph Long is a London-based writer and linguist from Hong Kong. He is a Philosophy graduate of King’s College London and has been a member of the Society of Authors in the United Kingdom since February 2020.)

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