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Dylan Loh, "China's Rising Foreign Ministry: Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy" (Stanford UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Duncan McCargo, President's Chair in Global affairs at Nanyang Technological University and a host on the network. I'm really pleased today to be joined by my good friend and colleague Dylan Lowe, who's an Associate professor in Public Policy and Global affairs here at the School of Social Sciences, also at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. And Dylan's the author of China's Rising Foreign Ministry Practices and Representations of Assertive Diplomacy, out from Stanford University Press in 2024. Dylan, welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:38]
C
Thank you, Duncan. A real pleasure to be here. And I look forward to the conversations.
- [01:43]
B
So there's been a lot of attention paid to Chinese foreign policy and diplomacy recently on a wide range of issues, from scam centers in Myanmar to Ukraine trump, the controversial new London mega Embassy. And all of this makes China's Rising Foreign Ministry an extremely timely book. It's received a lot of well deserved attention and praise, including honorable mention for the 2025 Diplomatic Studies Section Book Prize, which is sponsored by the isa. Yeah, Dylan, your book starts from this important premise, which is that diplomats matter. And that's a claim that to many people might seem counterintuitive in a world where national relations appears to be shaped primarily by bombastic hyper leaders and I'm old enough to remember Margaret Thatcher making clear her complete contempt for the upper class grandees, the British Foreign Office. So in the case of China today, what's the case for believing that the practice of diplomacy actually makes a difference?
- [02:35]
C
Right, thank you for starting off the conversation with such a good question and for having me. Again, I think we are starting off from a very low baseline in the literature, in particular on China's rise. Diplomats don't actually figure much, if at all, and that I always sat a bit strangely and oddly with me. So I set out on this mission to try to find out where exactly do they sit within the apparatus, an ecosystem of foreign policy. And as it turns out, they are not as unimportant as what the literature suggests. Again, bearing in mind that within the literature of China's rise and contemporary foreign policy, the diplomats and the Ministry itself is not often thought of as the central figure driving a lot of these major foreign policy decisions. Now, by no means am I suggesting that Ministry of Foreign affairs and its diplomats can somehow willy nilly adopt postures, positions, do things outside of what the top leader says. They still have to work within the broad general direction. But very interestingly, there are lots of leeway, latitude within the realm of possibilities for them to make decisions, to implement policies in particular ways and to say things in particular ways. And it is within this latitude that they have that they do play quite a consequential role in Chinese foreign policy.
- [04:01]
B
Okay, so for me, as a scholar of comparative politics who's not afraid of being labeled as doing area studies, and whose knowledge and research is, to put it crudely, deeply grounded in talking to people, what I like best about the book is the fact that you've done all these interviews, 104 interviews with 84 informants, including 47 people that you term Chinese, these diplomatic actors. And it's rare in IR for people to do this kind of serious interview based research. So why did you go about doing it that way and how did you manage it?
- [04:33]
C
You could say that I did it naively. So when I had this idea, the first thing that came to my mind, and this was also affected by my own methodological training, which is very qualitatively focused and grounded. So what's wrong with speaking to some diplomats? I'm just going to knock on some doors, drop some emails and that's it. Well, as it turns out, it is not easy. As you rightly pointed out, ethnographically sensitive work in ir, while an important, I would say almost mainstream component of methodology is not always feasible nor practical, especially the case of China. But I realized that there's an element of luck here as well. So I was doing field work in China in 201617 this was before COVID hit in the tail end of 2019 and it was also before the schools really tightened in the Chinese political system. So I wouldn't imagine having the sorts of conversations I had with folks that I used to speak with. So essentially I relied a lot on snowmobile sampling, I relied a lot on people making introductions, I relied a lot on Quanxi, which is tapping onto existing relationships and new ones that I've already established. I was thick skinned enough to quite repeatedly ask them to introduce me to this person and that person and that really set the ball rolling. In fact, the problem for me back then was I had to cut down on the number of folks that I'm going to speak to because there's just too many. It needed to be much more targeted, more methodical. That was actually the main challenge for me rather than access. It helped that I did not speak only and exclusively to Chinese diplomats because accessibility, the number of them willing to speak to me back then was also not, let's say not very high. So I spoke to non Chinese diplomats in Beijing that were able to help me reconstruct some of these diplomatic practices. How did the Chinese diplomats behave? What were their practices, what was different, what was interesting? How do you see that translating upwards into foreign policy. So that helped quite a bit in getting the warm bodies needed to construct this argument that I make in the book, which is China's diplomacy and its diplomats on the ascendancy and they rose together with China's rise as well.
- [06:49]
B
And do you think the fact that you're from Singapore and based here, of course doing this Ph.D. actually in Cambridge, which has a certain kind of cachet to it. Do you think these things helped you in terms of positionality to get access to people that you might not otherwise have been able to get access to?
- [07:06]
C
That's a very interesting question and I did think about it and I actually have an example to show. I would say the answer to that is yes. I think structurally it helps that I'm from Singapore, which is viewed as a country from the Chinese perspective as a friendly country, something that they do not see us as threatening. I think looking Chinese as an a Chinese being able to speak the language helps as well. Even though I have a discernible Singaporean accent. But that's still okay because one of the first few questions that my interlocutors from China would ask me is, oh, where are your parents from? Where are your grandparents from? To build a lot of affinity. And I admittedly strategically use it to gain access as well. So the example I was taking off, I had a friend, PhD student as well back then, who is German and has a very German name. Both of us, in no coordinated fashion, contacted somebody from the embassy in London, Chinese embassy in London. The person responded to me, but ignored my friend's email. We cannot but help come to the conclusion that nationality matters, ethnicity in some ways matter as well. So yes, I would say that it helped at least in opening up the possibilities and in helping me appear friendlier. Getting access.
- [08:24]
B
Right, and you do talk in the framing your arguments. There's quite a lot of theoretical stuff that we may get onto later. But you talk about this idea of practice theory, which is something IR people talk about, and we've had this conversation a little bit before. To mere empiricists like myself, the idea that a very theoretically laden discipline like IR needs to refer to something like interviewing people through the frame or lens of practice theory seems a little curious. Isn't what you're doing actually just empirical work of the kind that many other social scientists and humanities in other fields do? So I find the idea that it has to be framed as this special kind of theoretical work in order to talk to anybody is an interesting intellectual maneuver from the perspective of someone like me. But maybe I'm missing something, right?
- [09:17]
C
That's a great point that you make. So a couple of brief unpacking is in order here. Practice theory is an idea that is part of Bourdieu, Pierre Bourdieu's oeuvre. And Pierre Bourdieu, he's a sociologist. So essentially what we do in IR is to borrow concepts and practice theory is one of those moves because rightly so, Sociology, anthropology, they are more established traditions with a richer history, especially with conceptual history. So Bourdieu and practice theory is something that has been borrowed from sociology and applied to international relations. Bourdieu himself actually does not talk about international politics, doesn't really go beyond the nation state. But there is a lot of strong import or purchase to be had in his concepts and bringing it to bear in ir. So there's a growing tradition. Now, do we need the complex theoretical setup to do the empirical work? My answer is no, you did not need. But in fact what I was trying to do was to move in the tradition in getting folks in IR to focus on the empirics by focusing on what people do and say. It seems like a very simple point to make, that you need to just study and focus on what people say and do. But what I was arguing against was this tendency to have analysis remain at the abstract level. Right. So when you talk about a nation state, and you talk about China, for example, and you talk about countries as if they were billiard balls independently acting. Now, practice theorists, and by no means just restricted to practice theorists, say, wait a minute, we need to actually go back to the humans that make international politics. We need to actually study what they're doing, rather than simply look at states as being able to act on their own as if they were persons themselves. So that is where some of the theoretical move comes in, in arguing against this established tradition of theory and theory work being done, sometimes without empirical care, to the lived reality of the actors and the humans actually making a creative foreign policy and playing a role in politics. Great.
- [11:31]
B
Now that's really, really clear. For those of us who've struggled with this idea, I think you've set it out as coherently as anybody ever has during I've asked a few people this question before, so that is great. Now Giorgio comes up again, because we'll hear a bit about these important words, field and habitus as we go through the book. But in your second chapter, you're really dealing largely with the question of is the Ministry of Foreign affairs weak? And you relate your arguments to pretty recent domestic political changes in China. So can you explain how, say, the last 15 years or so, the rise of Xi Jinping, the shift in China's orientation, has transformed the role that the Ministry actually plays in terms of projecting Chinese values and power and talking points.
- [12:15]
C
That's a very good question. So I start off with this observation that the Ministry of Foreign affairs has actually ebbed and flowed in its power and influence now. So what I'm saying is that under Xi Jinping, it's quite contemporary. It's not a full historical exploration of the Ministry of Foreign affairs. Actually, since 2009, where people observed and in the literature, you observe an uptick in scholarship that changed. China has become more assertive. But this assertive quality tends to be restricted in economics in the sense of economic coercion or military might, in the sense of its modernization efforts and what it did in the South China Sea. What was missing was the story of its diplomats and its diplomacy. Now, when Xi Jinping became president and took over the race 2012, 2013, it was quite clear that he had very large, grand, ambitious goals in foreign policy. And this had meant that he had no choice but to rely on these existing tools and folks to play out and to implement his very ambitious goals, for example, Belt and Road initiative, for example, on its expensive claim over the South China Sea. So a couple of things indicate this. One of the moves was upgrading what was previously called the leading small group of foreign policy to a foreign policy commission. Now, to the uninitiated, it doesn't sound like much. You are just taking names, changing titles. But if you are aware of the Chinese domestic political system, calling something a commission is an upgrade over a leading small group, calling something a commission means that you better resources, you have higher symbolic prestige, you are more important, you have a direct line to Xi, and so on and so forth, which indicates that there is this move to raise the profile of the Ministry of Former Care. And then you have other moves, for example, having Wang Yi back into the Politburo, which is one of the apex, the 2425 member Politburo, and having previously Yang Xie Qi as a state councillor as well. So there are movements in terms of personnel, you increase the budget of the Mutual Foreign affairs, you raise its profile and you strengthen its apparatus. And as the top leader, you place greater emphasis because it's fundamental to your very wide ambitious foreign policy goals. So all of them came together such that the Ministry of Foreign affairs started intervening in matters not only on foreign policy, but on domestic issues as well. So all of this cohered and meant that China's Ministry of Foreign affairs and its diplomats were empowered to do more. Again, I stress that it doesn't mean that they can do so independently, but they were doing so with the blessings of the top leader.
- [14:58]
B
Okay, now, if I was going to summarize to my students or try my best to the arguments that you make in chapter three, which are about the field, another term familiar to those who've read a bit of Bourdieu of diplomacy in China. I definitely have to show them this onion shaped diagram on page 78 that depicts layers of power and influence and distinguishes between primary and secondary actors. I can just see the PowerPoints being based on that. Can you explain a bit to our listeners how that argument works? The argument that you depict in that onion shaped diagram that seems to convey the essence of the chapter and much of the essence of the argument of the book, actually.
- [15:34]
C
Right. So to begin with, very quickly unpacking what a field is. A field really refers to a space or a domain where different actors compete over rewards in the stakes in that particular class of Activity. So in the case of the diplomatic field in China, first I identify who are the players in the diplomatic space and then I identify what exactly are they competing for. They compete for influence, they compete for FaceTime with the top leader and they compete for input into foreign policy making within the field. With this concept I argue against Bordeaux as well, because for Bon Duo, field is competitive. He has very colorful language saying that people kill each other in the room to compete and fight for the stakes. I agree that people compete, but they cooperate as well. So here you see think tankers in the diplomatic field. Think tankers, academics working hand in glove with diplomats themselves. Diplomats use them to write reports, to generate some of the thinker pieces, generate concepts and ideas. Academics think tankers make use of their links to these more formalized channels as well and use that to gain influence, to use that to get a prestigious visiting fellowships abroad to tout their linkages and influence the decision making paradise as well. So yes, while they do compete for influence, and they do so quite a lot, they cooperate quite a lot as well. And in that diagram I was trying to underline which actor is closest or has the most influence in the field. Bearing in mind that of course this is dynamic, but in that snapshot it can only be static in the form of a picture that I put it out there. And I was trying to say, of course the Foreign Affairs Commission and Politburo Standing Committee itself has the most power. They are the ones that decide and set the strategic direction. But there are a couple of things interesting. There are actually a lot more actors in the field of diplomacy and foreign policy than what people normally assume. Many people just assume, okay, it's President Xi and then his, the man around him, that's it. And maybe foreign affairs, but actually it's far more complicated. Secondly, I think thinking of the diplomatic field in terms of field from Bourdeaux helps us understand hierarchy within the field as well. One that is at the same time both competitive but also cooperative. And the notion of a field is able to help us as a heuristic, to concretize and put together, think through how all these different diplomatic actors hang together.
- [18:08]
B
Right? And later on in the same chapter, you give some kind of, I suppose, illustration of this a little bit closer to home, talking about ASEAN and how China's getting more and more involved on pretty much everyday basis and how business is conducted inside asean, including the format of major regional gatherings. And seems you're more or less saying they're taking advantage of the non interference principle to interfere so how has this come about? That China's got more and more engaged with the internal processes of a regional organization like asean. How's it been able to penetrate this organization and to some extent encourage the organization to subordinate its purposes to external will?
- [18:52]
C
I think to answer that question, we need to talk a little bit about ASEAN first. ASEAN is now an 11 member grouping centered on Southeast Asian states. Institutionally it is quite weak. So as long as one member says no to a particular wording or a statement or whatnot, you cannot publish it. You cannot say that all of us agreed except for so and so country. There's no opt out or carve out clause. So that's where ASEAN is at Now. I wouldn't say, I wouldn't go so far as saying that ASEAN has subordinated its own interests in return for or because of China. But I will say that China has a lot of influence in and on ASEAN as an entity, on itself, but also with select member states. So China doesn't actually need all of ASEAN to follow or be aligned with its interests. It just needs one or two or three. Because of the conception or the norm of unanimity, every member has a veto power. And in China's mind, I think if ASEAN adopts a position that it deems to be rubbing up against its national interests, it has demonstrated it's prepared to make use of these principles. I document the instance in 2012, I think, where ASEAN for the first time is not able to issue a joint communique because publicly was reported because of Hungal and Cambodia under the influence of China. So these things happen. Now, I will add that China is by no means the only one prepared to pull its weight around. There are other actors as well. But there is certainly a case to be made that China influence and networks and cultivation is perhaps most extensive in Southeast Asia. Now this is tied to this idea of its emphasis on periphery diplomacy, of its near neighborhood. And just so happens that Southeast Asia is all within its periphery. Right.
- [20:45]
B
Isn't that what we used to call spheres of influence?
- [20:48]
C
Yes, it's another word you can stay. Although I think China will disavow that term.
- [20:54]
B
Indeed. Indeed. Right, okay, whatever you want to call it. That's obvious. I mean, it's obvious with all countries. They're particularly interested in parts of the world that are very close to them for reasons that make total sense. So in chapter four, you focus on what you call institutional habitus, a bit of Bulgarian language again, which most non academics would probably call organizational culture inside the ministry. And you have Some remarkable examples. You talk about these extraordinary books that they prepare to answer questions at press briefings. You note that the records that are kept are incredibly meticulous. And you quote this point that there are no small things in diplomacy. I guess it's this kind of observation that caused causes you to emphasize the importance of everyday diplomacy. How is such an elaborate habitus created and maintained over time?
- [21:42]
C
Again, another good question. I will have to respond to your original point that it is akin to organizational culture, but it goes beyond that. It's not just about organizational culture because it is also about the embodiment of institutional practices that exist in diplomats themselves, but in historical memory, in routines, in standard operating procedures, and in how they select and deselect diplomats. I will just add that it's something that as a concept, it goes beyond organizational culture on how they maintain institutional habit as well. Actually, that's a great question and I spent quite a bit of time talking about it. So one of the ways in which they do it is self selecting. So there are more people than the Ministry of Foreigners can take it in terms of people wanting to be diplomats. And many of these folks, they are educated, they are competent, and if they are all at the same or similar level of competency and academics, what do you then use to discern them? Political ideology, it's loyalty, it's fealt, and how well you are as a cadre, as a member in defending Xi Jinping and so on and so forth. So that's one of the key ways to maintain discipline. Now there are routines and rituals that they do to ensure that some of this historical, or rather institutional memory does not get lost and in fact gets reinforced. So I mentioned one of the things that they do is the so called death anniversaries and birth anniversaries of key figures, for example of Chou Enlai. Now the second part in which they do this is by embedding a party secretary in the ministry itself. So every ministry in China has it, including Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And this individual is supposed to govern and discipline and to ensure that institutional organization don't deviate from the party line. There's actually somebody who disciplines it as a matter of fact actively and ensure that it doesn't go away. I had this example, I think, in this chapter as well, where previously there was a law, it's a very simple, basic anodyne law, saying that okay, as an employee, my right and my obligations to the state is so and so forth. They change that by switching around the order. So instead of Your rights as an employee coming first in the wording. It is your duty to the organization that comes first and then subsequently your rights as an employee. Now again, it might seem like very unimportant and the main theories of international relations will not bother with the implications of that, but a practice sensitive approach will, because that is actually very consequential. You are sending a signal by saying you expect it to be self sacrificial and you must always place the interests of the party and the state before your personal interests.
- [24:26]
B
Great. I must say everything you mentioned about the institutional habitus for me was just the same as what I understand organizational culture to be. But we continue that conversation going forward. Twitter diplomacy is something that you focus on quite a bit too. Sounds nowadays, especially as Twitter has transformed into acts like a bit of an oxymoron. But how have Chinese officials used social media channels to advance diplomatic ends? I know this is an emerging field in ir, isn't it? With some of our colleagues in Copenhagen and other places doing great work on it. So how do you see that from the Chinese perspective?
- [24:59]
C
Yes, it's a very new way of conducting diplomacy and I have to remind listeners as well that X is banned in China. Yet we are in this exceptional state where there are certain individuals that are approved beforehand to go on social media or these banned platforms to do their work, which is indicative of foreign policy actually. Now Twitter diplomacy is interesting because it coincided with the peak of what we call wolf warriorism. In fact, the examples of wolf warriorism are often taken from what Chinese diplomats did on social media. One of the key figure of capturing the acne beside guys of Wu Horizon is Zhao Lijian and Patuning and others. What they did on social media was essentially it's not uncommon to see them calling out leaders, calling out foreign ministers, calling out politicians and in some cases insulting them. And then they realized oh wow, I can actually do a lot of things here. I can outwolf warrior my fellow diplomats. And in fact there was a period of time where they seem to be trying to outdo each other. Coupled with the fact that X creates or Twitter before that creates an environment where it's easy to manufacture state content, it's easy to manufacture stuff to lend the appearance that's real through manufactured accounts, bots, artificial amplification of certain tweets. And there remains good studies that shows how Chinese state actually make use of bots artificial accounts to amp up certain messages. So couple of points here making that first it was experimental from Chinese point of view as well they were trying this one first time and it coincided with the height of Wolf. Now, Wolf moralism in many ways have actually been scaled down. You don't see the kind of rhetoric, the hostile martial rhetoric that existed before, but by no means is it dead, but it has definitely scaled down because I think the Chinese state sees it quite clearly the limits of Wolf moralism. Second, I do not see Chinese diplomats trying to outdo each other as much as their period of time than ever before. Third, quite interestingly, I think there's a lot of learning other countries, more autocratic authoritarian regimes. You do see them mimicking on X, on social media, some of the practices that these Chinese diplomats themselves were using. So there's some sort of informal learning taking place as well where you can use these Western inflected platforms against those very countries themselves and in a bid to sway public opinion.
- [27:29]
B
Right, yes. You've already got onto the wolf warrior question, which was something I also wanted to ask you about. And I see that on one level this was a new phenomenon. But I can also tell you that back in the late 90s, which is now quite a long time ago, the then Chinese ambassador to the UK came up to Leeds, spoke to a packed lecture theater. There were some protesters outside, I remember. And he came in and presented himself in a way that really took me aback and took most of the people in the room aback. He said, I wish those protesters weren't outside. I want them in here so that I can debate and discuss with them. Please ask me anything. Ask me about human rights, ask me about Tibet, ask me about Taiwan. I have the answers. I'm ready to engage with you, I'm ready to debate with you. And I felt like this was maybe an early phase of this kind of cultural shift, but it wasn't what most of us in the room, including the China experts, amongst my colleagues from the Department of East Asian Studies really thought was going to happen. They had imagined a much more defensive, a much more cautious self presentation. So this shift has been going on for a while.
- [28:38]
C
It has. And I will add that in your case it comes as a surprise or a shock because it is anomalous. I don't think it was the norm. And you do still always find individuals like that from the ministry. The ministry itself is not as coherent as what people think. And there are some old warriorism. There were some folks from the older generation that looked upon what the younger generation were doing on Twitter and they didn't have the latitude of freedom as these guys had to criticize and go all guns blazing, and there's some sort of resentment. But there has been, as you gestured at earlier, a shift. I think with the rise of China, China simply has got much more resources, much more influence than before. And that shows that shows in the attitudes, in the positions that China has taken. I believe it was in 2019 that China overtook the United States for the first time as having the largest number of missions, embassies, consulates worldwide. Now, to me, that's quite telling. Of course, having that presence there doesn't necessarily lead straight away to influence the power, but I think it's a necessary precondition to that. And as China's role and interests becomes not just regional but global, then it kind of makes sense that it requires much more people, much more resources in China's diplomacy taking on a more assertive posture to defend its global interests. So from some angles, it is truly understandable that they have undergone this shift to a much more assertive posture. Yeah.
- [30:19]
B
So the only problem with writing a really impressive book based on your PhD is that you raise expectations for what's coming next. What are you working on now that the second Trump presidency has upended many of our assumptions about how diplomacy and the international order are meant to operate? What's coming up?
- [30:36]
C
We are living indeed through very interesting times, and interesting can be good or bad. I am indeed working on my second book project, not directly related to Chinese diplomacy, but I'm exploring or investigating this idea of discourse power. So Xi Jinping has made discourse power as one of the central pillars, and he has many other pillars, but one of the central pillars. Essentially, it stems from a dissatisfaction with what he sees as the international order, international discursive environment. Why is it that the west gets the legitimacy and authority to speak on so many issues, including defining what's human rights more egregiously? So why is it that it is the west that gets to authoritatively define China's rights? Something is not quite right. So there has been a concerted effort to increase China's discourse power. The book that I'm writing essentially tries to look at the motivations for increasing discourse power and how this horsepower, when you exercise it, what does it look like? So that's my second book project that I'm writing.
- [31:39]
B
Well, that's certainly something else for us to look forward to. And I hope this conversation will encourage our listeners to get hold of a copy of China's rising Foreign Ministry and take a deep dive into an incredibly empirically rich and theoretically nuanced analysis of the country's recent diplomacy. Dylan, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me on the New Books Network.
- [31:59]
C
Thank you. Duncan. Thank you for invitation. It's been a great conversation.
- [32:02]
B
I am Duncan Macago from NTU Singapore, and I've been in conversation with Dylan Low, an associate professor who is also at NTU's Public Policy and Global Affairs Program, and he's the author of China's Rising Foreign Ministry, out from Stanford in 2024. You've been listening to the new books.
- [32:26]
C
Sam.