Who Is ‘Losing China’s Face’?

The concept of mianzi, or “face,” is key to Chinese culture, as it is directly connected with the idea of dignity and prestige. Many Chinese idioms, such as “a person lives for his face; a tree lives for its bark,” talk about the importance of saving face and the humiliation of losing face. “Losing face in a foreign country” is used as a metaphor to describe a most disgraceful situation happening in public. Most Chinese people would rather suffer in private than lose face in public, not to mention in a foreign country.

The same rule used to apply to China’s foreign policy, too.

Many times in the past the Chinese government showed it preferred sacrificing its own people’s interests to having the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) lose face. After the great Tangshan earthquake in 1976, for example, in the name of “self-reliance,” the Chinese government rejected all foreign aid so as to avoid losing face by revealing the worst side of the nation to the outside world.

“Turn big issues into small ones and small issues into none” has been the typical approach for the Chinese government when faced with face-losing scandals. As for those scandals that can’t be covered up in front of the international community, the Chinese government tended to blame either the foreign media for “focusing too much on China’s dark side” or a specific individual or entity for “losing China’s face.”

Some China watchers even coined a term – “face-saving diplomacy” – to describe China’s foreign policy.

However, this pattern seems to have been broken since Chinese President Xi Jinping came into office in 2012. No longer regarding “saving face” as a priority, China’s various departments are becoming unusually aggressive in the international arena, even to the extent of causing damage to China’s reputation. This trend has been increasingly apparent since China amended its constitution and removed the two-term limit for the presidency and the vice presidency early this year.

Some disturbing recent cases serve as examples.

In early August, Sun Wenguang, an 84-year-old retired professor from Shandong province, was abruptly arrested by local police in the middle of giving a telephone interview to Voice of America (VOA). During the interview, Sun was criticizing the Chinese president’s foreign policy, accusing Xi of “throwing around money in Africa.”

In its rush to silence Sun, the local government didn’t bother to wait until the interview was completed. Over the telephone, Sun told VOA that he was holding a knife to keep seven to eight Chinese security officers at bay before his signal was cut off.

Days after Sun was allowed to return home under strict security, VOA's Mandarin Service correspondent Yibing Feng and VOA contractor Allen Ai attempted to interview Sun through the closed door of his apartment. To make matters worse, while trying to talk to Sun, both VOA journalists were dragged away and detained by Shandong police for hours. This disturbing process was recorded by the journalists and broadcast to the whole world.

U.S. Republican Congressman Chris Smith called the detention of the two journalists “brazenly heavy-handed, even by China’s low standards for press freedom.”

Although the top Chinese authorities probably did not make the direct decision to detain Sun or the two VOA journalists,  this case showed that the local governments would rather lose face internationally than displease China’s top leaders.

China’s foreign ministry – the government organ that is supposed to care the most about China’s image abroad – has also showed a tendency to sacrifice China’s reputation for political purposes.

In early September, a Chinese family (one adult man and his two senior parents) arrived at a hostel in the Swedish capital Stockholm at around 2 a.m. They had a reservation for the next night but had arrived well before the permitted check-in time. After refusing to leave the hostel’s lobby, the family was finally removed by the Swedish police and dropped off at a cemetery.

Video showing the Swedish police carrying the three Chinese tourists out of the hostel was posted on Chinese social media and went viral immediately. While both the Chinese family’s behavior and the Swedish police’s measures were debatable, the Chinese foreign ministry’s reaction was unusually strong.

Rather than “turning big issues into small ones,” the Chinese foreign ministry chose not only to defend this Chinese family but to make the episode a tempest in a teapot.

The Chinese Embassy in Sweden first issued a strongly worded statement, condemning the Swedish police for severely violating “the basic human rights of the Chinese citizens” and demanding “punishment, apology and compensation.”

Two days later, at a regular press conference, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Geng Shuang further urged “the Swedish side to attach importance to the Chinese side’s concern and take concrete measures to guarantee Chinese tourists’ safety and legitimate rights.”

The Chinese embassy in Sweden even published a travel alert warning all Chinese tourists about the danger of visiting Sweden.

Immediately, this individual case was turned into a diplomatic issue. Many analysts couldn’t help but link the Chinese foreign ministry’s overreaction to the Dalai Lama’s recent visit to Sweden and the dispute between China and Sweden over the continued imprisonment of Swedish citizen Gui Minhai – a Hong Kong-based bookseller.

David Bandurski, the Berlin-based co-director of the University of Hong-Kong's China Media Project, has referred to China’s new diplomacy as “porcelain bumping,” or “pengci,” a practice of “manufacturing drama to obtain a desired outcome.” The term is believed to have originated from the shady practice of tricking a passerby into breaking a porcelain object, with the intent of forcing him or her to pay for the item.

In an article for The Guardian, Bandurski argued that the Chinese foreign ministry’s “broken porcelain” has sent a message to governments and societies in Europe and beyond:

[W]herever you seek to criticize our policies or forestall our ambitions, we will topple your agenda. We will shatter the porcelain of diplomatic composure and fan the anger of our population with debased facts until every issue you raise is about just one issue – China’s national dignity.

In China, “porcelain bumping” is regarded as a disgraceful technique, used only by shameless fraudsters. Under Bandurski’s analysis, then, the approach the Chinese foreign ministry is adopting now is the most “face-losing” diplomacy.

To some degree, the properness of the Chinese foreign ministry’s reaction to the Swedish case can be open to discussion. But the Chinese authorities’ decision to “disappear” Meng Hongwei, the then-president of the International Criminal Police Organization (Interpol), was absolutely unacceptable before the international community.

At midnight on October 7, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), the highest internal-control institution of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), released an extremely short statement confirming that Chinese Deputy Public Security Minister Meng Hongwei, who is also the first Chinese president of Interpol, had been detained by Chinese authorities. This statement came one day after the Lyon-based organization made a formal request to China for information about Meng and Meng’s wife held a press conference in Lyon, France, speaking to reporters from around the world about her husband’s disappearance.

What was notably odd and also concerning in this case, however, was not the abrupt detention of Meng (since such practices are quite common in China), but the Chinese authorities’ strong-minded decision to “disappear” Meng in spite of the inevitable damage to China’s international reputation.

Additionally, different from the Sun Wenguang case, the case of Meng Hongwei – considering Meng’s senior positions at home and abroad – must have been approved by China’s top leader. It means that Xi Jinping himself is willing to sacrifice China’s “face” abroad for some unknown yet urgent reason.

All the cases mentioned above show that China’s various organs, including China’s local governments, the foreign ministry, and the state security ministry, are turning unusually aggressive. The fundamental motives for these departments to behave in such a way could be different: Some might be attempting to please the top leader; others might do so out of fear.

Whatever the motive, the consequence is the same – China’s international image is increasingly deteriorating, but it seems that few bother to care about “face saving” now.