32 The Economist December 18th 2021
China
BullyingsmallcountriesA frigid farewell
O
ne of theChinese government’s fa
vourite pieties is to warn Western de
mocracies against starting a new cold war.
A peaceful world needs more “winwin”
cooperation, intone Communist Party of
ficials, not more ideological cliques. This
winter those words ring hollow in Beijing’s
embassy districts. On the diplomatic front
line, it is China that appears to have
launched an undeclared cold war. It seems
confident of winning.
An early skirmish took place on Decem
ber 15th, when the small Baltic republic of
Lithuania withdrew all its diplomats and
their dependants from Beijing “for consul
tations”, leaving its embassy locked and
empty. Their evacuation followed an esca
lation of a monthslong Chinese pressure
campaign, aimed at punishing Lithuania
for allowing the democratic island of Tai
wan to open a representative office in its
capital, Vilnius. China calls the Taiwanese
office an affront to its sovereignty, since it
claims Taiwan as its own territory.
The evacuation was not undertaken
lightly. The shuttering of the embassy,which Lithuania insists is not closed for
good, is the worst crisis in relations be
tween China and a European state since1981. That year the Chinese ambassador to
the Netherlands was recalled in response
to the sale of Dutch submarines to Taiwan.
SinoDutch ties remained downgraded for
three years. Lithuania has been without an
ambassador in Beijing since September,
after China asked its envoy to leave. In No
vember China unilaterally declared that
each country’s respective embassy would
be demoted to an office headed by a chargé
d’affaires, or caretaker.
Lithuania’s diplomats were given until
December 14th to hand in their Chinese
identity cards to have them changed to re
flect their mission’s diminished status.
Not knowing whether the staff would re
tain diplomatic immunity, and not accept
ing its embassy’s demotion, Lithuania told
all diplomats and dependants to keep their
cards and leave the next day on an Air Chi
na flight to Paris. In scenes worthy of a
coldwar thriller, the Lithuanians duly
gathered beside a busy ring road near their
embassy on a grey midweek morning. The
evacuees—tenselooking adults, teenagers
in headphones and a pet cat in a crate—
boarded a coach, watched by plainclothes
police. Colleagues from friendly embassies
gathered to offer an escort to the airport.
To hear Chinese officials tell it, any
looming cold war is the fault of America,
an enfeebled yet vicious bully which is
scheming to thwart China’s rise. State me
dia say Lithuania, a country of 2.8m peo
ple, is surely too small to decide to defy
China alone, and charge that it was either
trying to curry favour with America or
heeding American orders. In truth, similar
suspicions once circulated among Euro
pean Union governments, especially dur
ing Donald Trump’s presidency, when
American officials roamed the world urg
ing allies to defy China.
But the Baltic republic points to its long
history of standing up to bullying foreign
ers, including Nazi Germany and the Soviet
Union. In 2019 Lithuania denounced Chi
na’s embassy there for rallying people to
disrupt a protest in support of Hong Kong’s
democrats (Chinese diplomats were pho
tographed handing out banners). In 2021
Lithuania announced its withdrawal from
the “17 plus one”, a Chineseled grouping of
former communist countries in centralB EIJING
As relations sour, Lithuania evacuates its embassy in Beijing→Alsointhissection
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