By Yew Lun Tian and Laurie Chen
BEIJING (Reuters) – China’s top diplomat Wang Yi has been reinstated to his old job as foreign minister, which he held for nearly a decade since 2013, after the shock removal of his interim successor.
Wang, 69, is a career diplomat and fluent Japanese speaker who served as China’s ambassador to Tokyo and head of the Taiwan Affairs Office for China policymaking.
Dubbed the “silver fox” by Chinese state media and Internet personalities for his gray hair and diplomatic tricks, Wang now heads the Chinese Communist Party’s Foreign Affairs Commission, the top foreign policy decision-making body.
Considered by some of his foreign counterparts to be suave and charming, he has become more assertive in recent years: a supporter of China’s aggressive and often harsh diplomatic style.
Political Cartoons of World Leaders
“No matter how much you dye your hair blonde or how sharp you make your nose, you will never be European, American or Western,” he told his Korean and Japanese colleagues at a forum earlier this month, in criticism of their western stance.
He told U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in 2022 that the U.S. should “stop trying to deal with the Chinese in a place of power.”
When he met Blinken in Beijing last month – the first visit by a Washington diplomat in five years – he told him that China had “no room for compromises or agreements” on Taiwan, the democratic island China claims as its own and Washington supports.
Journalists were also on the receiving end of Wang’s sharp tongue.
After a Canadian journalist asked him about human rights in 2016, he replied that the question was “full of anti-China prejudice and arrogance”. I don’t know where that came from. It is totally unacceptable,” he said through an interpreter.
Wang was kept busy after stepping down as foreign minister in 2022.
He was seen as instrumental in brokering a peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March and then represented his successor Qin Gang in several meetings after disappearing from public view for a month before being removed.
(Reporting by Yew Lun Tian; Editing by Christina Fincher)
Copyright 2023 Thomson Reuters.
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