A Chinese diplomat has let slip the truth about Beijing’s foreign policy

The off-colour comment by Lu Shaye, China’s ambassador to France, that post-Soviet countries such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania did not enjoy ‘an effective status within international law’ was not a gaffe or a case of a Chinese official gone rogue. Instead, Shaye’s remark, which he made on Friday night on France’s LCI channel, must be seen for what it is: a telling admission of Beijing’s real thinking about international relations, which is far cruder and Hobbesian than most Europeans are willing to admit.

Why should we take Lu at his word when he says that for Soviet Republics including the Baltic states ‘there’s no international accord to concretise their status as a sovereign country’? For a start, Lu is a veteran of both Chinese communist politics and foreign service. He served as deputy mayor of Wuhan and as ambassador to Canada, among other countries. He epitomises China’s aggressive approach to diplomacy, exemplified by his warning, in the context of a visit by former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s to Taiwan, that the Taiwanese would have to be ‘re-educated’, bringing back eerie echoes of Maoist and Stalinist terror. 

Unless Lu’s superiors in Beijing provide a prompt and vigorous correction, Europeans – many of whom long assumed that China was amenable to becoming a responsible stakeholder in the international system – must conclude that the regime in Beijing views the world through the same set of lenses as the Kremlin.