By LANG HAI
Diplomacy Correspondent
BEIJING (China Daily Show) — On Twitter, he’s a self-styled “Wolf Warrior”: aggressive, paranoid, and thoroughly annoying.
But former friends say Zhao Lijian, the bullish spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, is really more a “weasel” who “can’t fight for shit.”
Up-and-coming Zhao, 47, is perhaps the best known of China’s so-called Wolf Warriors — international diplomats who take their name from a 2017 film that had absolutely no international impact.
“Hardly anyone outside China saw the Wolf Warrior movies,” said the noted philanthropist and Sinologist Sir William Buckfast. “But those that did thought they totally sucked. So I’d say the title is highly appropriate.”
“It’s hilarious that Zhao is acting this way now,” recalled Bo Chouwen, 47, one of several of the pugnacious politician’s ex-classmates who spoke to China Daily Show. “As a kid, Zhao preferred to pick on girls, so we used to shove his head down the latrine. But we stopped after realizing that he liked it.”
“Sure, I remember him,” recalled a 48-year-old who also attended the Tangshan No.4 Middle School alongside the loquacious lupine. “Zhao once wrote an essay claiming the leaders were absolutely right to send the military into Tiananmen Square on June 4 — this was three months before the crackdown.”
Few recalled Zhao as being intimidating or useful in a fight, though. “Quite the opposite,” Bo noted. “He was hopeless, and just used to run away.”
Still, Bo conceded that Zhao probably wasn’t entirely without purpose.
“I guess if you need someone to shoot unarmed students or torture captive pangolins, he’s your man. Well, person.”
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