Seeing red: fury as strategy in China's Taiwan-related diplomacy

Abstract

For observers of Chinese diplomacy, anger has become one of Beijing’s most recognisable signals on the topic of Taiwan. The pattern is a familiar one: a foreign government’s representative speaks about the island in a way that is considered unacceptable to China, sparking an immediate and remarkably well-coordinated backlash. Some of the responses from China’s diplomats, as Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi recently discovered, could be charitably characterised as robust.