Antoine Bondaz, a research fellow at the French think tank Foundation for Strategic Research, recalled his first encounter with Lu Shaye, the Chinese ambassador to France, in their BFM TV debate in February 2020: “What really surprised me was that there was an entire Chinese delegation in the room. It was like the prince and his court.
“It was very French,” he joked.
Lu may have the ego of a stereotypical French leader, but he hasn’t made himself popular in the country. In the three years since the debate with Bondaz, Lu has thoroughly antagonized his French hosts with a barrage of incendiary media stunts that have degraded bilateral relations. Lu’s latest incident in April on French broadcaster LCI, in which he denied the sovereignty of ex-Soviet states, was perhaps his most egregious to date. “Even if the French are used to Lu Shaye’s words … often halfway between provocation and denialism, his statements reached a new level,” wrote Philippe Le Corre, a senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute.
Pushback was swift. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs called his remarks “unacceptable” and told him to “ensure that his public statements are in line with his country’s official positions.” French President Emmanuel Macron said that “it’s not the place of a diplomat to use that kind of language.” Almost 80 members of the European Parliament signed a letter urging the French government to declare Lu persona non grata, and all three Baltic states summoned their Chinese ambassadors to demand an explanation. The Chinese embassy in France quickly deleted the interview transcript from its WeChat.
While Beijing distanced itself from Lu’s remarks, the incident has further confirmed him as China’s most outspoken wolf-warrior diplomat. It is only the latest in a long career marked by confrontation against the West and Western media, and awareness of the power of media to dictate narratives. Lu epitomizes Chinese President Xi Jinping’s struggle to simultaneously project an assertive China for nationalist audiences at home and cultivate diplomatic friends in Europe. These two aims are often in tension with one another, and Lu has emphatically prioritized the former.
Born in 1964 in Nanjing, China, Lu said he was relatively spared by the Cultural Revolution. His parents, however, were both doctors, and thus among the educated class often targeted by radical Maoists, and his father was imprisoned. Nevertheless, Lu joined the Communist Youth League. In middle school he studied French. After passing the university entrance examination he failed to get into his original target school, the European literature department at Peking University, and instead settled for diplomacy at China’s Foreign Affairs University—the normal route for aspiring diplomats.
Lu’s Francophile background propelled him to a number of Africa-related positions in China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which he joined shortly after graduating. In 1988, he worked for several years as a staff member at China’s embassy in Guinea, and then in the 1990s climbed his way up the ministry’s Department of African Affairs. In 2001, he spent two years as a counselor at the Chinese embassy in France. His ambassadorship began in 2005, when he spent four years leading the Chinese mission in Senegal, followed by another four years directing the ministry’s Department of African Affairs starting in 2009. After a brief stint as deputy mayor of Wuhan, China, in 2014, he returned to Beijing in 2015 to direct policy research at the Central Committee’s Office of the Leading Group on Foreign Affairs.
Lu (second from left) joins local officials for a picture during a visit at the ZooParc de Beauval in Saint-Aignan-sur-Cher, central France, on Aug. 26, 2019. Guillaume Souvant/AFP via Getty Images
Lu’s combative attitude towards the West predates Xi’s wolf-warrior diplomacy. At a conference hosted by the French Institute of International Relations (IFRI) in 2011, a Jeune Afrique reporter noted Lu’s “aggressive” rebuttal of Western criticism against China, concluding: “This character is extremely offensive.” Replying to a question about the prospect of China-Africa cooperation in a 2013 interview, Lu went out of his way to say that “Western media never forgets to attack China,” adding: “What did Western countries do for Africa during the 50 years of African independence? Nothing. They in turn blame China, which is unfair.” In another state interview one month earlier, he criticized Western media for disseminating “fake information.” Such messages were often eagerly received in Africa—but were even more popular back in China.
It was in 2017 that Lu’s bellicosity found a wider, Western audience, when he was promoted to Chinese ambassador to Canada, several months before the release of the movie Wolf Warrior II. Immediately after arriving at his new post, he lectured Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to “spend less time bowing down to Canadian journalists preoccupied with human rights and get on with negotiating an important free trade agreement with China.” In January 2019, he argued that Western calls for the release of two Canadians held hostage in China reflected an attitude of “Western egotism and white supremacy.” That same month, he also threatened unnamed “repercussions” for Canada if Huawei were banned from the country’s 5G network.
Truculence appeared to have paid off. In August 2019, Lu was promoted to ambassador to France, a prized diplomatic position with a more prominent role than his position in Canada, one month before Xi gave a speech calling on Chinese officials to embrace a “fighting spirit” and have “the courage to fight.” Lu’s transfer was met with caution in France. Reporters Without Borders expressed concern about his intimidation of the media, and stated: “[Lu’s] undiplomatic style will sharply contrast with the relative discretion of his predecessor.”
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic strained Sino-French relations, and Lu leaned into the conflict. In April 2020, “a Chinese diplomat in Paris” published on the embassy’s website a lengthy diatribe against Western media, vaunting the Chinese “victory” over the pandemic and claiming that nursing staff at French retirement homes had “abandoned their posts overnight … letting the residents die of hunger and sickness.” The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Lu to express its disapproval.
Lu then brought his fighting spirit to social media. In May 2020, his embassy tweeted a cartoon symbolizing death wrapped in American and Israeli flags, knocking at the door of different countries, with the caption, “Who is next?” Around that time, his embassy also began participating in an online disinformation campaign by posting dozens of conspiracy-filled tweets insinuating that COVID-19 originated in Fort Detrick in the United States. Later, his embassy tweeted about Le Point’s investigation into Chinese influence in French universities, asking, “Is the magazine Le Point a media outlet or a tool to attack China?” During Lu’s ambassadorship, IFRI researchers Marc Julienne and Sophie Hanck wrote that while a number of Chinese missions deployed communication strategies on Twitter to criticize local media, “France is undoubtedly the country in which the attitude of the diplomatic mission was the most vehement.”
Lu (center) meets with members of the media at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa, Canada, on Jan. 17, 2019, when he was China’s ambassador to the country. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press via AP
The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Lu again in March 2021, after the Chinese embassy repeatedly insulted Bondaz, the French researcher. Bondaz had criticized China’s position on Taiwan over social media, and in response the Chinese embassy called him a “little thug” on Twitter. Two days later, the embassy published a communiqué on its website calling Bondaz an “ideological troll” and a “mad hyena” who “furiously attacks China.” Lu even refused the ministry’s diplomatic summons, and opted to show up the next day with his own demands. The ministry described the Chinese embassy’s “insults and attempts at intimidation … [as] unacceptable.”
The following year, in May 2022, Lu went on French television as then-U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet was visiting Xinjiang province in China. Lu claimed that the Uyghurs reportedly detained were actually “trainees” in “education centers” and “not interned.” To date, France still maintains a ratified extradition treaty with China. Dilnur Reyhan, a professor at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris and head of the European Uyghur Institute, finds it “incomprehensible that France still hasn’t expelled [Lu],” she said. “How are we supposed to feel safe if, after all his vulgar, insulting, and criminal excesses, France does nothing?” she told Foreign Policy.
The various summons by the French Foreign Ministry appear to have had little effect on Lu. Undeterred, he returned to LCI in August 2022 to proclaim that after reunification with mainland China, the Taiwanese people “must be reeducated,” echoing language used by Chinese officials to describe policies imposed upon Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
The French establishment resoundingly judges Lu as being undiplomatic. “He displays the face of a harsh and barking diplomacy,” wrote French newspaper Libération, adding, “China certainly has better to offer than this caricature that benefits no one.” Even French journalist Richard Arzt—who received a glowing profile in Chinese state media after his five decades of covering China—wrote, “Never has any other Chinese ambassador been so offensive towards France as Lu Shaye.”
Lu’s grandeur may partly explain his provocations. Recalling her several encounters with the Chinese ambassador, French lawmaker Anne Genetet called him a “cordial but authoritarian” man who “wouldn’t listen.” Bondaz noted that “[Lu] interacts very little with people who criticize him,” and that “the echoes we hear from the embassy and Chinese diplomats is that hardly anyone dares to criticize him. He’s in a permanent bubble of self-confirmation. And he doesn’t know when to stop talking.” As with Xi, this yes-men bureaucratic support structure can lead to bad decision-making.
Lu’s confidence may indicate a somewhat privileged relationship with his bosses in Beijing, one that allows him to take risky interviews with foreign media. Beyond his frequent French television appearances, in December 2022 Lu was the very first Chinese official to publicly comment on the A4 protests, which he claimed were “taken advantage of by foreign forces” and “exaggerated reporting.” François Godement, special advisor and resident senior fellow at Institut Montaigne think tank, recently tweeted: “Lu is among those who think they interpret their boss more correctly than measly mouthed diplos, and that they will be rewarded.”
Conflicting priorities in Beijing complicate the interpretive performance. Lu’s “fighting spirit” on French television has simultaneously undercut China’s efforts to win over Europe. But given that Lu does not appear to have been reprimanded by Beijing for previous provocations, “loyalty is probably more important than diplomatic tact,” said Jérôme Doyon, a China specialist at Sciences Po’s Centre for International Relations.
Lu speaks during the inauguration of the Ark of Fraternity in Paris’s 13th arrondissement on Feb. 1, 2020.Getty Images
As Lu himself revealed in a 2021 interview: “Westerners accuse us of not conforming to diplomatic etiquette, but the standard for us to evaluate our work is not how foreigners look at us, but how people in China look at us. … Our work is evaluated by these standards, not whether foreigners are happy or not. We can’t stop doing it just because they are unhappy.” In another interview, in 2022, Lu explained that “Chinese diplomacy has really gone through some changes these past two years. We don’t want to continue with ‘lamb’ diplomacy, because as the fable goes, the lamb ends up being eaten by the wolf.”
Hence, continued confrontation is on the menu, to the delight of Chinese nationalists. After Lu’s summoning in 2021, China’s Global Times wrote: “The tough rhetoric of Lu on matters related to China’s core interests has been widely applauded by the Chinese public, and many Chinese netizens praised Lu for doing a good job in defending China, adding that Chinese ambassadors should stand up firmly for China’s core interests.” Embracing his celebrity status, he raved in a later interview: “I’m very honored to be called a “wolf warrior.”
After the most recent incident two weeks ago, most Chinese netizens rallied to Lu’s defense with patriotic furor and nihilistic rationalizations. Some popular comments on Weibo read: “Offense is the best defense”; “It doesn’t matter if he succeeds or not, as long as he can make them uncomfortable”; and “As long as foreign politicians talk nonsense, can’t Chinese ones do so, too?”
Some Chinese reactions highlighted Lu’s bravery in weathering the “difficult” style of Western media interviews. Nationalist pundit and former France-based reporter Zheng Ruolin enthusiastically praised Lu for “daring to speak out in an obviously hostile environment.” One Global Times reporter shared a more nuanced take on Weibo by citing an interview she conducted with Lu earlier this year. She was impressed by his “understanding of the media and public opinion,” and his willingness to accept live interviews and debates on French television, which come with “more uncertainty and uncontrollability” and “more sharp and sensitive questions” than in China.
It is unclear whether Beijing will remain as encouraging in the future. An anonymous former Chinese diplomat told the South China Morning Post, “Pending a full assessment of [Lu’s statement’s] impact, it may be necessary to keep a tighter control of senior envoys, at least for the time being.” The timing of Xi’s long-overdue call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after Lu’s gaffe also may indicate Beijing’s displeasure with Lu’s damage to Sino-European relations.
But Bondaz is confident Lu will return. “Each time [he is summoned], he disappears for a few weeks and then comes back,” Bondaz said. “He’s an opportunist. Next time there’s an international event, he’ll resurface in the media and do more interviews.”