'Silver fox' Wang Yi returns to lead China's foreign ministry

Yew Lun Tian and Laurie Chen
·2 min read
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FILE PHOTO: China's Wang Yi at ASEAN Foreign Ministers meeting in Jakarta
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By Yew Lun Tian and Laurie Chen

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's top diplomat Wang Yi has been given back his old job as foreign minister, one he had held for almost a decade from 2013, after the shock removal of his short-lived successor.

Wang, 69, is a career diplomat and fluent Japanese speaker who served as China’s ambassador in Tokyo and head of China’s policy-making Taiwan Affairs Office.

Likened to a "silver fox" by China’s state media and online admirers due to his greying hair and diplomatic wiles, Wang currently heads the Chinese Communist Party Foreign Affairs Commission, the top foreign policy decision-making body.

Regarded by some of his foreign counterparts as suave and charming, he has become increasingly tough in recent years: a proponent of China's aggressive and often abrasive "wolf warrior" style of diplomacy.

"No matter how blonde you dye your hair or how sharp you make your nose, you will never become European, American or Western," he told South Korean and Japanese counterparts at a forum earlier this month, in a criticism about their pro-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 from a position of strength."

When he met Blinken in Beijing last month - the first visit by Washington's top diplomat in five years - he told him China had "no room for compromise or concessions" on Taiwan, the democratic island China claims as its own and Washington supports.

Journalists have also been on the receiving end of Wang's sharp tongue.

After a Canadian reporter asked him about human rights in 2016, he responded by saying the question was "full of prejudice against China and arrogance". "I don’t know where that comes from. This is totally unacceptable,” he said through an interpreter.

Wang had been kept busy after stepping down as foreign minister in 2022.

He was seen as instrumental in brokering a surprise peace deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia in March and then stood in for his successor Qin Gang at several engagements after he disappeared from public view for a month before his removal.

(Reporting by Yew Lun Tian; Editing by Christina Fincher)