This article from Sankei Shimbun’s “Seiron” analyzes China’s aggressive “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” through historical episodes involving Red Guards, anti-Soviet actions, and violent provocations in Hong Kong. Cultural anthropologist Yang Haiying argues that extreme nationalism—“wolf’s milk”—has shaped generations of Chinese officials, including today’s diplomats. The piece also sharply criticizes Japanese corporations dependent on China, asserting that decades of such dependency enriched the CCP while impoverishing Japan. The article urges Japan and the international community to respond firmly, including the use of “persona non grata” measures.

The following is from today’s Sankei Shimbun “Seiron.”
It is essential reading not only for the Japanese people but for people around the world.

I would particularly like to ask this of Masayoshi Matsumoto, Chairman of Sumitomo Electric Industries and Chairman of the Kansai Economic Federation, who is practically my senior.
If Sumitomo Electric Industries, or the Kansai Economic Federation, consists of companies that cannot survive without China—a one-party dictatorship under the Communist Party, whose true nature is “bottomless evil” and a “seemingly plausible nation”—then, to put it bluntly, why not shut down your business?
You are nothing but an obstacle to the future and peace of humanity.
To begin with, are you even able to bring back to Japan the profits you earn in China smoothly?
Are the numbers simply increasing on your balance sheets?
Is it not the case that, because you cannot repatriate profits, you merely reinvest them inside China, thereby increasing China’s GDP?
Is it not true that what you have been doing for more than thirty years is enriching China while impoverishing Japan?
As proof, Japan’s GDP has barely grown from 550 trillion yen over these past thirty-plus years.
It is an indisputable fact that GDP rose to 600 trillion yen only during the brief period when Prime Minister Abe worked hard.
In other words, your business in China has done nothing but enrich China (the CCP) and increase China’s (the CCP’s) arrogance.
This is why the wages of Japanese workers have not risen by even one yen for more than thirty years.
Do you still fail to realize even now that for more than thirty years you have been completely taken advantage of by China?
How then can you call yourselves the elite of Japan?
Far from being elite, you are nothing more than exam-cramming honor students—second-rate or third-rate individuals who in fact bring harm to the nation.

The Essence of “Wolf Warrior Diplomacy” as Shown by History
Cultural anthropologist, Professor at Shizuoka University
Yang Haiying
All emphasized text within the article except the headline is by me.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi recently stated in the Diet that a Taiwan contingency could constitute a “situation threatening Japan’s survival,” and she has been attacked by China for this.
Xue Jian, the Chinese Consul General in Osaka, posted on social media (later deleted), targeting the Japanese prime minister, saying: “There is nothing to do but cut off that dirty head.”
On the 13th, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Kenji Kanasugi, Japan’s Ambassador to China, protesting that Prime Minister Takaichi’s remarks were “unacceptable to the Chinese people.”
This proactive foreign posture is known as “wolf warrior diplomacy,” and it has been a consistent practice of the People’s Republic of China.

The “Wolf’s Blood” of Socialism

Hailar Station on the Hulunbuir grasslands in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China.
In this area, where Russian-style and Japanese-style buildings intermingle, it prospered as a strategic point of Manchukuo from the late Qing dynasty when the Chinese Eastern Railway was constructed.
After being occupied by Communist China, international trains ran from Beijing to Moscow.
When China and the Soviet Union shifted suddenly from being “intimate socialist brothers” to mutually denouncing each other as “revisionist states betraying Lenin,” Hailar became the frontline of confrontation.
On September 3, 1966, Red Guards threw pamphlets into Soviet trains—written in Chinese, Russian, and Mongolian—titled “Criticizing the Treacherous Acts of the Soviet Communist Party in Nine Points.”
Soviet crew members resisted and captured two Red Guards who had stormed into the train.
After the scuffle, when the Red Guards were released, the Chinese government sent a special plane to bring them back to Beijing.
Prime Minister Zhou Enlai lavished the highest praise upon them, saying, “You are the young heroes of the anti-revisionist struggle,” and on September 15 they were granted an audience with “the great leader Mao Zedong.”
Although attacking international train crew and boarding without permission is a violation of international treaties, the Chinese government defended the Red Guards.
Since then, this Red Guard generation grew increasingly hostile toward international society, and in China they are regarded as “the generation that was raised on wolf’s milk.”
Xue Jian belongs to a later generation that inherited this.

China decided at the end of 1966 that it would not acknowledge its own faults and had nothing whatsoever to learn from foreign countries, and ordered overseas students to return.
Sixty-five Chinese students staying in France and Finland were scheduled to return home via Moscow on January 24, 1967 by international train.
Following instructions from the Chinese Embassy in the Soviet Union, the students gathered in Red Square the next day and offered flowers at Lenin’s Mausoleum.
The Soviet side permitted this since offering flowers was acceptable.
However, the Chinese took out the Quotations from Chairman Mao and recited aloud, “Comrade Stalin alone is the true friend of the Chinese people.”
This implicitly criticized the current Soviet leadership, and they were immediately expelled.
More than thirty Chinese were injured in the melee with Russians as they fiercely resisted.
The Chinese government welcomed them back in Beijing, and Chen Yi, Vice Premier and Foreign Minister at the time, warmly received them, giving them armbands that read “Anti-Revisionist Red Guards.”
They were treated as heroes who criticized the leader of a foreign country in the capital city of that very country, further encouraging nationalism.

The Mongolian People’s Republic stood on the Soviet side and kept its distance from China, since ethnic Mongolians in Southern Mongolia were being oppressed.
One day in early August 1967, a Mongolian diplomat walking in Beijing stepped on a scattered copy of the People’s Daily.
Because Mao Zedong’s portrait was printed in that newspaper, Beijing residents beat him, injuring him, on the grounds of “insulting the great leader.”
Naturally, the Mongolian side protested and expelled the Xinhua News Agency correspondent and overseas Chinese.
This was retaliation for China’s unauthorized distribution of Quotations from Chairman Mao and anti-Soviet pamphlets.
China responded by expelling the diplomat who had been beaten by its own citizens.
It was Chinese citizens who had thrown away a newspaper with the leader’s portrait in the first place, and distributing political materials in a foreign country was also a violation of rules—yet China refused to acknowledge its own fault.

How to Confront the “Wolf Warriors”

It was not only socialist countries with which China clashed.
China sought to provoke British authorities by inciting large-scale strikes in Hong Kong in the spring of 1967 through Communist Party members and spies operating underground there.
The Hong Kong authorities responded firmly, and on July 8 Beijing sent militias who infiltrated Hong Kong.
When Hong Kong police counterattacked, the People’s Liberation Army behind the militia responded with heavy weapons, resulting in casualties on the Hong Kong police side.
On August 22, Beijing citizens and Red Guards, attempting to support the frontline militia, stormed the British representative office (later the embassy) and set it on fire.
Afterwards, Hong Kong was returned to China, but it is well known that China has never once honored the series of treaties agreed upon between China and the United Kingdom, calling them “old scraps of paper.”
There is not just one or two “wolf warriors” nurtured under extreme nationalism.
Most of today’s Chinese people harbor anti-Japanese sentiment deep within and act arrogantly in Japan because this “wolf’s milk” called patriotism has permeated them like a genetic imprint.
Calm and gentlemanly responses do not work on wolf warriors.
When the time comes to expel them, we must not hesitate to take “persona non grata” measures and act in concert with the international community.
Since the responses taken by the Mongolian People’s Republic and the Soviet Union were correct, China has come to show respect toward Russia and Mongolia even today.

(Yang Haiying)