The Chinese Communist Party is not satisfied with threatening to decapitate the Japanese prime minister, Sanae Takaichi, for suggesting that a PRC attack on Taiwan would constitute a threat to Japan too, warranting a military response. The Party must confirm and reconfirm this threat (CNN, November 12, 2025).
“The dirty neck that sticks itself in must be cut off,” wrote the Chinese consul general in Osaka, Xue Jian, in a post on X that has since been deleted.
The fallout has spiraled since, with Japan criticizing Xue’s “extremely inappropriate” post and Taiwan voicing concern about Xue’s “threatening” remarks, according to Reuters.
Beijing, meanwhile, has defended its position and Xue’s comments.
A spokesperson from China’s foreign ministry on Monday accused Japan of “grossly interfering with China’s internal affairs,” saying Xue’s post was simply responding to Takaichi’s “erroneous and dangerous remarks.”…
Communist Party mouthpiece People’s Daily condemned Takaichi as “recklessly shooting her mouth off,” and warning: “No one should harbor any illusion that they can cross the line on the Taiwan issue without paying a price.”…
Hu Xijin, a Chinese pundit and former editor-in-chief of the state-run tabloid Global Times, offered a more violent warning, echoing the threats from the diplomat Xue.
“China’s battle blade for beheading invaders has been sharpened to a very keen edge,” he wrote in a post on Tuesday. “If Japanese militarism wishes to come to the Taiwan Strait to sacrifice themselves on our blades, we will fulfill them.”
The CNN article discusses Japanese atrocities in China during World War II. This discussion is not paralleled by discussion of CCP atrocities over the past 75 years.
The Washington Post quotes another Party pundit, Ren Xiao, a professor in Shanghai: “A spat like this is certainly not going to lighten the mood for China-Japan relations. If Takaichi refuses to read the room and doubles down on her unpleasant comments, of course the Chinese side won’t hold back either.”
Anti-diplomacy
If you’re going to be doing “diplomacy” with the People’s Republic of China, an impossibility, you have to know who you’re dealing with, people who believe that threatening to chop off heads is an appropriate way to correct “erroneous” and “unpleasant” remarks about the necessity of self-defense in response to aggression.
The CNN writer suggests that the Party’s signature wolf-warrior “diplomacy,” consisting of the nth degree of verbal aggressiveness and gaslighting, had been receding somewhat lately “as Beijing looked to win back lost goodwill among Western nations.”
Maybe. Not so I’ve noticed myself, particularly. What I’ve been seeing from Party “diplomats” is lots of shuttling back and forth between expressions of open hostility, one mode, and syrupy, empty happy talk about the totalitarian “shared global future” and the like, another mode. Any brute can switch to a cloying and spurious benevolence at will, and it doesn’t take much to evoke the brute once again. I suppose that which mode dominates varies from time to time.
Also see:
StoptheCCP.org: “China’s Wolf Warrior Diplomacy and Its Near Relations”
“At what point does ‘combative’ diplomacy stop being diplomacy?”
