Dylan M.H. Loh’s fascinating book, China’s Rising Foreign Ministry, is a theoretically enticing and empirically rich account of the practices of China’s diplomacy and how China’s assertiveness is manifested through its foreign ministry. The book focuses on the period from 2009 to 2020 and yields several empirical findings: 1) the Chinese foreign ministry’s representational role has become more pronounced as it intervenes and represents Party and state across various domains; 2) Chinese diplomacy has become increasingly assertive, albeit in an incremental way; 3) the Chinese foreign ministry exercises considerable influence through its counseling, implementing, and coordinating competencies; 4) official perceptions of China’s identity are derived, frequently, from the Chinese foreign ministry; 5) Twitter diplomacy has reinforced offline assertiveness and has extended it to the online sphere as China seeks an extra vector to generate discourse power (p. 137). Loh’s book makes theoretical and empirical contributions to the study of Chinese foreign policy while adding to the ongoing debate about assertiveness.
Theoretically and methodologically, China’s Rising Foreign Ministry utilizes concepts in sociology to examine diplomatic practices, filling the gap about China’s practice of diplomacy with detailed and rich interview data. In this regard, the book makes four contributions. First, the abundance of interviews as well as participatory ethnographic work in this book help create a more systematic analysis of China’s practice of assertive diplomacy than prior work (see, for example, Peter Martin, China’s Civilian Army: The Making of Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, 2021). Second, the book goes beyond the material aspect of power, highlighting the functional abilities of China’s foreign ministry: advising, implementing, and facilitating/coordinating.
Third, utilizing concepts in sociology, the book emphasizes the performative nature of the practice of diplomacy, thereby explaining aspects of seemingly bizarre Chinese foreign policy practices. For example, one of Loh’s interviewees noted that when meeting with Philippine counterparts formally, the Chinese diplomat interjected incessantly to push his point across, while reserving particularly unkind words for the Philippine diplomats and their president (p. 47). However, once the meeting was over, he turned collegial in his interactions with his Philippine colleagues (p. 48). Off stage, Chinese foreign ministry spokespersons have different personalities even as they maintained a consistent demeanor in press briefings (p. 47). This performative aspect of China’s diplomatic practice is similar to what Ahsan Butt calls “performative wars” by the United States: wars fought in order to demonstrate resolve to the rest of the world (Ahsan I. Butt, “Why did the United States Invade Iraq in 2003?” Security Studies, 28(2), 2019).
Fourth, dissecting the state and moving beyond a state-centric view, Loh’s book demonstrates the divergence among China’s foreign policy agents. For instance, when spokesperson Zhao Lijian promoted a debunked conspiracy theory that COVID-19 was released by the U.S. military in China, he was criticized by some diplomats within China. China’s ambassador to the United States, Cui Tiankai, rebuked Zhao and distanced himself from such claims by calling them “crazy” (p. 62). This divergence suggests that “wolf warrior” diplomacy is not internalized by every Chinese diplomat and that there is subnational variation despite the Chinese political system being centralized.
Now that I have discussed the theoretical and methodological contributions of the book, let me turn to empirical contributions, which also abound. First, the book offers a dataset of assertive and cooperative Chinese foreign policy behavior from 2009 to 2020, in the form of the appendix. It would have made the book even more valuable if the appendix can be visualized as figures and examined more systematically in the main text of the book.
Second, the book demonstrates the critical perceptual differences about how China views assertiveness and how foreign counterparts do. For example, in Chapter 2, the book shows how the performance of China’s foreign minister at a press conference in Canada was viewed negatively by Western audiences as a sign of aggression and a breach of diplomatic sensibilities. However, Wang’s press conference was praised back home, signifying strength and diplomatic competence. According to one Chinese interviewee, “We do not think this view of others seeing us as assertive as accurate. This view comes especially from the West. For us, to use assertiveness is to be more active (jiji 积极). It has positive connotations, more like confidence, rather than negative connotations. These activities that you see from our diplomats reflect that confidence. It comes with China’s rise. It is natural you see this on the world stage” (p. 92). As such, there is a perceptual difference between how China defines assertiveness and how others view China’s behavior. Loh’s book makes an important point that explains how the assertiveness “meme” comes about more recently despite China having used assertive measures in the distant past (see Ketian Zhang, China’s Gambits: The Calculus of Coercion, 2024). That is, perceptions of China’s identity by other officials, diplomats, and representatives are commonly derived from the Chinese foreign ministry and its diplomats (p. 98). The assertiveness of the foreign ministry’s agents and institutions comes to characterize China from the perspectives of other non-Chinese diplomats (p. 98). It is in this sense that Loh accurately demonstrates the growing importance of the Chinese foreign ministry.
The perceptual difference between how China and other countries view assertiveness leads to a question about Loh’s book: how do we define assertiveness? Is there an objective definition of what is assertive? Loh defines assertiveness as “the tendency to leverage one’s resources to impose costs on others to extract compliance and/or police behavior” (p. 16). “Diplomatic assertiveness refers to using various diplomatic levers to extract concessions, police behavior, and impose costs” (p. 16). This definition begs the question: how does one distinguish assertiveness from coercion or coercive diplomacy? Is coercive diplomacy the same as diplomatic assertiveness? Or is there a difference between assertiveness and coercion and if so, what is it? The dictionary definition of assertiveness is “confident and forceful behavior” and, if we follow the dictionary definition, would it be fruitful to include both negative and positive aspects of assertiveness? That is, wolf warrior diplomacy is an example of negative (and possibly coercive) assertiveness, whereas China’s participation at the UN, albeit assertive, is not necessarily negative (for China’s increasingly active participation at the UN, see Courtney J. Fung, China and Intervention at the UN Security Council: Reconciling Status, 2019). In this sense, Loh could potentially make greater use of the dataset in the appendix to tease out positive and negative kinds of China’s assertiveness.
Relatedly, Loh argues in the book that China’s assertiveness is progressively guided by and represented through its foreign ministry and its diplomats rather than military actors, though the latter have traditionally been considered the key component of Chinese assertiveness. This observation is very much in line with my work on China’s coercion that China has been increasingly utilizing non-militarized coercive tools in lieu of military coercion (Zhang, China’s Gambits). This shift, however, does not necessarily mean that the military is no longer central. Rather, it may suggest that there is more inter-agency coordination, as Loh’s book points out.
In short, China’s Rising Foreign Ministry is a wonderfully rich account of the practice of China’s foreign policy. It moves beyond a state-centric model to examine the individuals implanting Chinese foreign policy and convincingly pushes back against the notion that the foreign ministry is not a critical actor in Chinese foreign policy. Its fascinating interview and ethnographic data aptly demonstrate that Chinese assertiveness has increasingly come to be represented by Chinese diplomats and the foreign ministry. One final question arises precisely from one of the interviews. One former Chinese diplomat noted in the interview that they felt very restricted, stifled, and watched (p. 85). While this is not the question Loh’s book sets out to answer, one cannot but wonder: how does one evaluate the effects of the current practice of China’s diplomacy? What are the foreign policy and domestic politics impacts of a Chinese diplomat corps that is heavily restricted and has a constant need to show allegiance to the Chinese political system?
