He did not deviate from his reputation as a “wolf warrior”, as these Chinese diplomats with their offensive rhetoric towards the West are nicknamed. During a televised interview on Friday, April 21, Chinese Ambassador to Paris Lu Shaye caused an uproar after he questioned the sovereignty of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) countries, and of Crimea’s membership of Ukraine.
This is not the first time that Lu Shaye, stationed in Paris since August 2019, has made remarks which have earned him summons to the Quai d’Orsay. On subjects as diplomatically sensitive as the war in Ukraine, the Covid-19 or even Taiwan, the diplomat, perfectly French-speaking, defended Beijing by moving away from the truth.
Asked about the war in Ukraine, on LCI on April 21, Lu Shaye questioned the sovereignty of the countries of the former USSR, dissolved in 1991. “The countries of the Soviet Union have no effective status in international law because there is no international agreement to materialize their status as a sovereign country,” the ambassador said. Yet these fifteen countries – like China – are members of the United Nations (UN) and signatories to its Charter, Article 2 of which states that “The Organization is founded on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members”.
During this same interview, the diplomat did not clearly recognize that Crimea, annexed since 2014 by Russia, belonged to Ukraine. These remarks caused an outcry in France and abroad. The Chinese ambassador’s statements were described as “unacceptable” by the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrel, for whom “the EU can only assume that these statements do not represent the official position of China”. .
The ambassador was received on Monday, April 24, at the Quai d’Orsay – an interview scheduled before the controversy – by the chief of staff of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, who informed him of the “unacceptability” of his statements and the called “to use his public speech in a manner consistent with his country’s official positions,” according to a statement.
Beijing, in fact, had distanced itself from the words of its ambassador a few hours earlier. The Chinese Embassy in Paris issued a statement to assure that Mr. Lu’s remarks on Ukraine “were not a statement of politics, but an expression of personal views during a televised debate “.
“China respects the sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity of all countries and supports the purposes and principles of the UN Charter,” said Mao Ning, spokesperson for the Chinese Foreign Ministry. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, China was one of the first countries to establish diplomatic relations with the countries concerned. »
In August 2022, the visit to Taiwan by Nancy Pelosi, the US Speaker of the House of Representatives, sparked intense protests from China, which claims sovereignty of the independent island.
Guest on LCI, Lu Shaye took the opportunity to rewrite history:
“You have to study history to know better about this issue of Taiwan (…) Taiwan has been under the administration of China since 230 AD, at the time, in Europe, of the Roman Empire. Much earlier than the appearance of France. »
While the island seems to have first appeared in Chinese records in 239 AD, when an emperor sent an expeditionary force to explore the region, it was already populated by aborigines. China took no further interest in it for centuries, until the Dutch colonized part of this territory in 1624. The Chinese did not take control of Taiwan until 1683 and ceded it to the Japan two centuries later, in 1895, after the First Sino-Japanese War.
In 1945, the island was returned to China after the Japanese defeat in World War II. After Mao Zedong’s Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, Nationalist troops retreated to Taiwan. Two regimes then claim the entirety of Chinese territory: the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of China, based in Taiwan. But in 1971, the United Nations (UN) recognized Beijing as the sole representative of China. Since then, Taiwan no longer has a seat at the UN but retains all the attributes of a state. For its part, Beijing has never ceased to reaffirm the principle of one China, and considers Taiwan as a rebel province. “There has therefore been a limited and partial sovereignty for a little over two hundred years, recalled researcher Antoine Bondaz at 20 Minutes, but above all, the current regime in China, led by the Chinese Communist Party, has never administered Taiwan. »
In late May 2022, Lu Shaye told CNews that Uyghurs repressed by the Chinese regime were “not interned” but “in educational and vocational training centers”. “They are trainees,” he even assured. These remarks came at a time when the international community had its eyes riveted on China, while Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, made a rare visit to Xinjiang.
However, the “Xinjiang Police Files”, published at the same time by an international media group including Le Monde, documented the repression suffered by the Uyghur minority and orchestrated by Beijing. This leak of some 100,000 police documents exposes a security obsession in these internment camps. Three months after her visit and a few minutes before the end of her mandate, Michelle Bachelet published in August 2022 a damning report against the Chinese regime. “The extent of arbitrary and discriminatory detention of Uighurs and members of other predominantly Muslim groups (…) in a context of restriction and deprivation of fundamental rights, both individual and collective, may constitute international crimes, in particular crimes against humanity,” observed the United Nations in its findings.
The Chinese ambassador had already been summoned to the Quai d’Orsay in 2021 after insulting a French researcher on Twitter on March 19. Antoine Bondaz, a member of the Foundation for Strategic Research who had denounced Chinese pressure on French parliamentarians wishing to visit Taiwan, had been described as a “small strike” by Lu Shaye.
The diplomat had driven the point home by publishing, two days later, on the website of the Chinese Embassy, ??a press release qualifying the researcher as an “ideological troll”, accusing him of pro-Taiwan positions. “Diplomacy is defending the interests and image of your country. If China’s national interests and image are threatened or harmed, Chinese diplomats will naturally defend them tooth and nail,” he said, before attacking the “mad hyenas” who “dress up clothes of researchers and media and furiously attack China”.
Deeming these remarks “unacceptable”, the Quai d’Orsay had summoned the ambassador on March 23 to warn him that the behavior of the embassy constituted an obstacle to the development of Franco-Chinese relations.
In a text published in April 2020, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, on the website of the Chinese Embassy in Paris, the diplomat intended to “restore distorted facts”. Mr. Lu assured that “the nursing staff of nursing homes [who] abandoned their posts overnight, deserted collectively, leaving their residents to die of hunger and disease”. An accusation heavy enough for the then Minister of Foreign Affairs, Jean-Yves Le Drian, to summon him and express his “disapproval” of “certain recent remarks”.
China had defended itself by speaking of “misunderstandings”, denying any “negative comments on the way France is coping with the epidemic”. Finally, the Chinese Embassy in Paris explained that it wanted to target Spain. However, the use of the French acronym Ehpad (accommodation establishments for dependent elderly people) could logically be perceived as a reference to French structures.