Five years ago, in 2019, China’s diplomats stopped being diplomatic. High-profile ambassadors and foreign ministry spokespeople began to make acerbic, sarcastic, and negative statements on Twitter (now X), in press conferences, and behind closed doors. The contrast to Chinese diplomats’ previously tactful and circumspect rhetorical style was so striking that observers at home and abroad conferred a colorful new moniker on China’s emissaries: “wolf warriors.”

The primary aim of wolf warrior diplomacy was to disarm foreign critics through public confrontations, often using emotionally evocative language. In July 2019, for example, one of China’s senior diplomats in Pakistan traded barbs with a former U.S. national security adviser on Twitter. In November, the Chinese ambassador to Sweden made headlines when he said, “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns.” During diplomatic talks in Alaska in March 2021, China’s senior diplomat Yang Jiechi publicly warned Secretary of State Antony Blinken not to “smear China’s social system” and a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson criticized the U.S. delegation for creating a hostile atmosphere “filled with the smell of gunpowder.”

Yet the peak of wolf warrior diplomacy has now passed. Over the last three years, Chinese diplomats have gradually returned to a more traditional approach. Likely under orders from President Xi Jinping, they have toned down their public statements and focused on improving relations with the United States, western Europe, and the developing world. Social media accounts linked to the Chinese foreign ministry remain active, but their messaging has become less biting and confrontational. Foreign ministry press conferences, too, have become more subdued. Several of the diplomats whose statements made international news in 2019 and 2020 have retired or moved on to new assignments.

Many scholars and policymakers attribute the rise of wolf warrior diplomacy to the nationalism of the Chinese public and Xi’s personalist leadership. Yet more important than any domestic factor is the change in China’s international environment. In the year or so before the COVID-19 pandemic, Chinese leaders were reacting to a sharp increase in foreign criticism—most notably from the United States—which they perceived as a threat to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As foreign criticism softened, so did China’s approach to diplomacy.

Going forward, U.S. policymakers must consider the effects of their public comments carefully. If Beijing again believes itself to be under siege, the wolf warriors may come back—damaging the prospects of constructive dialogue between China and the United States.

THE RISE OF THE WOLF WARRIOR

China’s diplomats are not fundamentally different from those of other countries. The country’s foreign ministry conducts the same activities as any other, relaying messages to and from foreign counterparts and reporting developments abroad. Chinese emissaries are not the only ones whose job requires them to engage with hostile countries, deliver coercive threats, and explain their country’s actions to foreign critics. Typically, however, diplomats in China and abroad relay even the most unpleasant news in language that carefully calibrates and precisely identifies the message that political leaders wish to convey.

Chinese diplomats have generally embraced that professional ethos since the founding of the People’s Republic. Zhou Enlai, the country’s first premier and foreign minister, oversaw initiatives in the 1950s and early 1960s to build a large, well-trained corps of foreign emissaries. After a dramatic detour during the Cultural Revolution, which upended China’s diplomatic activities, the foreign ministry became even more professionalized. By the late 1980s, the vast majority of senior Chinese diplomats had a college degree. They routinely drafted white papers, held press conferences, and engaged counterparts abroad. The country’s diplomats grew more skilled at communicating with foreign audiences, too. As the political scientists Taylor Fravel and Evan Medeiros noted in Foreign Affairs in 2003, China’s emissaries had become “more sophisticated in their articulation of the country’s goals.”

The diplomatic corps became more assertive as China’s economic and military power rose, especially after Xi became general secretary of the CCP, in 2012. But the real turning point in Chinese diplomatic practices—what would become known as wolf warriorism—came in the late 2010s. Between 2017 and 2020, the proportion of hostile responses to foreign ministry press conference questions roughly doubled, according to analysis conducted by Yaoyao Dai and Luwei Rose Luqiu. In particular, as research by Weifang Xu illustrates, the frequency at which diplomats described foreign countries in unfavorable terms during these press conferences increased substantially in 2019. From 2018 to 2019, Chinese diplomats opened more than 100 new Twitter accounts. Although much of the content posted on these accounts was unremarkable, many Chinese diplomats used these platforms to spar with foreign critics.

The term “wolf warrior” was already in the Zeitgeist at the time of the Chinese foreign ministry’s diplomatic shift. Wolf Warrior 2, the second installment of a popular action film series, was released in 2017. The series followed a fictional special operations unit charged with unconventional missions to defend China’s interests. The tagline of both films—“Even though a thousand miles away, anyone who affronts China will pay”—seemed to fit Beijing’s diplomatic campaign to stand up to foreign critics. By 2020, audiences at home and abroad were describing China’s real-life diplomats as “wolf warriors.”

UNDIPLOMATIC DIPLOMACY

Although wolf warrior diplomacy emerged amid China’s broad transition to a more assertive grand strategy under Xi, the term referred to a narrow phenomenon. Above all, it was describing a communicative style. In contrast to the pleasantries and palatable language that typically fill the world of diplomats, wolf warriors employed a negative and, more important, emotionally evocative tone. In both professional circles and public communication, they deliberately chose colorful phrasing and eschewed tact.

A prominent feature of wolf warrior diplomacy was its emphasis on divisions between “us” and “them.” Chinese diplomats characterized foreign officials as hypocritical, unvirtuous, or irrational compared with Chinese leaders, who exhibited consistency, moral rectitude, and common sense. In June 2021, for instance, the Chinese ambassador to France said that he was “honored” to be called a wolf warrior and he commented that such diplomats were simply protecting China from “mad dogs”—the country’s critics abroad.

The meaning of Chinese emissaries’ evocative statements was often in the eye of the beholder. Foreign audiences generally perceived the new diplomatic style as impolite and tactless. Scholars and foreign policy commentators in the United States, for example, have described China’s wolf warriors as “impassioned,” “zealous,” “strident,” “confrontational,” and “aggressive.” Yet according to Chinese diplomats themselves, their statements were a defensive response to the hostility around them. In May 2020, China’s foreign minister said that the country’s representatives were simply correcting “malicious slanders” and “gratuitous smears” directed at China. Another Chinese diplomat commented that the “need to fight wolf wars” stemmed from the fact that “there are wolves in this world.”

FOREIGN ORIGINS

Across periods of nationalist fervor and quiescence, across collective and personalist rule, one trend in Chinese politics stands out: the CCP is allergic to criticism that questions the regime’s right to govern. This criticism rarely sparks debate in the halls of power in Beijing. Instead, it prompts Chinese leaders to shut down dialogue and lash out against the critics. Thus, when international criticism directed at China increased in the late 2010s, the Chinese government responded by mobilizing its diplomats.

During this time, China faced rising foreign opprobrium for its internment camps in Xinjiang and its crackdown on protests in Hong Kong. As U.S.-Chinese relations deteriorated under President Donald Trump, too, U.S. officials became increasingly critical of Beijing. Criticism was not absent at the start of Trump’s term; the administration’s National Security Strategy, released in December 2017, labeled China a revisionist power. But its censure of the Chinese political system picked up after October 2018, when Vice President Mike Pence delivered a speech at the Hudson Institute in which he condemned China for “meddling in America’s democracy.”

International criticism came to a head with the COVID-19 pandemic. Although some admonition could be dismissed as a xenophobic reaction to the virus’s origins in China, the responses of foreign leaders and media also called into question the legitimacy of China’s domestic institutions. Why, they asked, had the Chinese government been slow to contain the virus? Was Xi unable to extract quality information from the bureaucracy? Had Chinese scientists been silenced? Had local authorities ignored the central government’s rules and regulations? Throughout the pandemic, too, Western commentators debated whether China’s top-down system would fare better or worse than democratic models, raising doubt about China’s ability to produce effective vaccines and stop the spread of disease.

Much of the criticism of Beijing’s decisions may well have been justified. The pertinent point, however, is not the merit of the criticism but its timing: the strongest international censure coincided with the peak prominence of China’s wolf warriors.

Chinese emissaries made the connection between foreign opprobrium and their own diplomatic tactics explicit. In late 2019, Zhao Lijian—a paradigmatic wolf warrior who was then serving in the foreign ministry in Beijing—told BuzzFeed that it was “time for Chinese diplomats to tell the true picture” in response to U.S. officials who were “slandering” and “badmouthing China.” In December 2020, Chinese Vice Minister Le Yucheng made similar comments, declaring, “Now that [foreign critics] are coming to our doorstep, interfering in our family affairs, constantly nagging at us, insulting and discrediting us, we have no choice but to firmly defend our national interests and dignity.”

Some analysts have argued that domestic dynamics were the main cause of wolf warriorism. They generally attribute its rise either to the demands of the Chinese public or lower-level officials’ desire to appease the country’s supreme leader. In the first account, Chinese diplomats, aware of high levels of nationalist sentiment at home, decided to cater to bottom-up appeals for a more assertive posture toward foreign countries. And in the second, following Xi’s anticorruption campaign and consolidation of power, diplomats worried that Xi and higher-ups within the foreign ministry would question their political bona fides, and this concern compelled them to independently adjust their messaging in a direction that they believed Xi, who is known for his foreign policy ambitions, would approve.

Both accounts leave much unexplained. There is little evidence that Chinese public opinion shifted dramatically enough during the late 2010s to drive a spike in wolf warrior tactics. Nationalism has been salient in China since the 1990s, and especially so since Beijing hosted the Olympic Games in 2008—long before the sharp change in China’s diplomatic approach. Assigning Xi a shadowy role in generating a climate of fear also obscures the fact that he intervened directly in diplomatic practice. In 2019, as the recent wave of wolf warrior diplomacy began to build, Xi reportedly ordered Chinese diplomats to exhibit a “fighting spirit” as they carried out their duties. Sources in China suggest that Xi’s direction may have been a result of his frustration with the state of the U.S.-Chinese relationship. Xi seemingly believed that China had no choice but to confront the barrage of international criticism it faced—and he instructed his emissaries to do just that.

RETURN TO NORMAL

China’s wolf warrior diplomacy began to recede in 2021. In May of that year, Xi convened a Politburo collective study session, a forum for the senior party leadership to listen to briefings and issue guidance, to discuss China’s international communications. The proceedings of the meeting are not available to the public, but it is possible that Xi used the venue to order the bureaucracy to ratchet down hostile diplomacy toward the United States and western Europe. The scholars Samuel Brazys, Alexander Dukalskis, and Stefan Müller detected changes in the messages directed toward the countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development from Twitter accounts linked to the Chinese foreign ministry and other parts of the Chinese government in the months after the study session.

Not coincidentally, China’s shift toward less aggressive diplomacy occurred just as the international environment became less hostile toward Beijing. Foreign criticism, particularly from the U.S. government, tempered under the Biden administration. To be sure, U.S. officials have condemned human rights abuses, touted the superiority of democratic institutions, and called out Chinese leaders for choices with which it disagrees. Yet the White House and the State Department have also more readily offered assurances that Washington’s aim is not to change the regime in Beijing. In May 2022, Blinken affirmed that the United States and China would “have to deal with each other for the foreseeable future.” And in June 2024, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell stated explicitly that seeking regime change in China would be “reckless and likely unproductive.”

Meanwhile, Chinese leaders may have seen a window of opportunity to stabilize relations with foreign countries, particularly the United States and western Europe. Chinese decision-makers do not want to drift into prolonged isolation, which would undermine China’s prospects for economic growth and its search for international status. China’s flagging economy has undoubtedly made the case to soften Beijing’s diplomatic approach more compelling.

In addition to this impulse to mend fences, Xi may also have chosen to rein in wolf warrior diplomacy because it was undermining, rather than strengthening, China’s public image. The best available evidence suggests that China’s rhetoric did not shift foreign public opinion in the country’s favor. Survey experiments by Weifang Xu have instead showed that defamatory messaging tended to increase American public support for hard-line policies toward China. Similarly, experiments by Daniel Mattingly and James Sundquist have found that negative messaging about the United States did not consistently improve attitudes toward China in third-party countries, such as India—and may have had a negative effect when issued during military confrontations with Beijing. Interviews conducted by Dylan Loh suggested that at least some Chinese diplomats and scholars recognized that wolf warriorism was ineffective. Yet it is unclear whether their observations reached the ears of high-level decision-makers and, even if they did, whether this shaped the decision to subdue the wolf warriors.

DIPLOMATIC TRADEOFFS

The rise and fall of wolf warrior diplomacy was, ultimately, a function of Chinese leaders’ perception of the international environment and the threat it posed to the security of their regime. This central insight leads to two important conclusions for U.S. policymakers. For one, the decline of heated Chinese rhetoric may not be permanent. China’s diplomatic corps has proved its ability to adapt quickly to changing conditions, and party leaders may once again unleash the proverbial wolves if it suits their interests.

Additionally, Washington must consider how its pronouncements about the way the Chinese government rules may undermine opportunities to maintain lines of communication. American policymakers often, and oftentimes rightly, feel the urge to criticize the actions of foreign governments when those actions contravene American values. When it comes to issues such as the repression of ethnic minorities, the United States can and should continue to speak out for what it believes.

Fair as its criticism may be, however, such rebukes do not come without cost. The United States benefits from diplomatic engagement with China that allows both sides to clarify their positions, demarcate redlines, and defuse tensions. As the 2021 talks in Alaska illustrated, however, such opportunities are squandered when Beijing’s diplomats instead use them to make the case for the regime’s right to rule. Efforts to publicly defend China’s national honor by lashing out at foreign critics, moreover, add noise to communication channels, which can make China’s actual position even more difficult to discern. Even if the United States has come to embrace a competition-based relationship with China, encouraging Chinese emissaries to use their finite diplomatic bandwidth to stage confrontations is not in the U.S. national interest.

U.S. policymakers must thus bear in mind the tradeoffs when they make statements that China’s leaders perceive as an attempt to undermine their domestic legitimacy. A common trap that Washington falls into is to view its criticism of a foreign government as merely an affirmation of U.S. values—and to overlook the possibility that the leaders of that government will see the criticism as a threat to their political survival. There are times when the United States may consider it appropriate, or even desirable, to censure China. But if the type and frequency of its condemnations reach the point of threatening the CCP’s sense of security, Washington should expect a wolf warrior reaction. U.S. policymakers will have to decide whether the costs to diplomatic channels are worth it.