Is Communist China sending a pacific signal by the apparent demotion of one of its top foreign ministry officials — nicknamed a “wolf warrior” for his aggressiveness toward America and other nations? The official, Zhao Lijian, “has been moved to an obscure department,” the Financial Times reports, in an “unusual transfer for an official” who had seemed one of the ministry’s “highest flyers.” The Guardian asks if it’s a “demotion.”

We wouldn’t read too much into Mr. Zhao’s transfer to a lower-profile role in “boundary and ocean affairs” — nor too little. The FT reports President Xi is eyeing a “reset,” hoping to mend frayed diplomatic ties. Yet if Beijing really means to rein in its envoys, what about Red China’s highest-ranking diplomat, Wang Yi, who hectored State Secretary Blinken and America at the opening of a parley between the two nations in March 2021?

In the astonishing breach of protocol, Mr. Wang pointed to the George Floyd protests as a sign that “many people within the United States actually have little confidence in the democracy of the United States” and vowed “China will not accept unwarranted accusations from the US side.” Mr. Zhao defended his colleague’s tirade by noting — ridiculously — “it was the US side that … provoked the dispute in the first place,” the Guardian reported.

Mr. Zhao also sparked outrage in Australia when in 2020 he tweeted an apparently doctored image of an Antipodean soldier “holding a knife to the throat of an Afghan child,” the Wall Street Journal said. The image was captioned with a pro-China message: “Don’t be afraid, we are coming to bring you peace.” Beijing defended Mr. Zhao, asking if critics were “justifying the ruthless killing of innocent Afghan civilians by Australian soldiers?”

The job transfer for Mr. Zhao “could be because he had caught too much attention,” a scholar of Chinese diplomacy tells the FT, suggesting the wolf warrior “needs some time and space to cool off.” At the same time, the move comes at a time when China’s neighbors in East Asia — and peace-loving nations around the world — appear to be starting to wake up to the threat of military aggression from the Communist regime at Beijing.

Japan, for one, is showing signs of coming to grips with the gravity of China’s threats to peace in the region. Prime Minister Kishida is on a tour of the Group of Seven nations, including a visit to Washington on Friday, in an apparent effort to shore up alliances. At London today he inked with Prime Minister Sunak an Anglo-Japanese security pact that, significantly, “will allow the countries to deploy forces on each other’s soil,” Reuters reports. 

Mr. Kishida is also presiding over a defense buildup that would surely cheer his predecessor at Tokyo, Shinzo Abe, as our Benny Avni reports, featuring a doubling of military expenditures to two  percent from one percent of Japan’s economic output. After “seven slumbering decades,” Mr. Avni observes, Japan “is flexing its muscles again,” eyeing “threats from its Communist neighbors, Red China and North Korea.”

Then again, too, North Korea is in effect an extension of Beijing’s authority, a client state of President Xi. This places China at the heart of Japan’s security concerns — creating an opportunity for Japan and South Korea to forge closer defense ties, as President Yoon is advocating. Free Korea’s leader is calling for “closer security cooperation with America and Japan” as a counterweight to the “dangerous situation” from the North, the AP says.

Free China, too, is showing signs of taking the danger from Beijing more seriously. Taiwan is extending its compulsory military service to one year from four months. The island democracy is also modernizing its civil defense forces. Its security, though, will depend on American intervention in the event of a Communist invasion. It’s a reminder that even if one warrior has been sidelined, the Chinese wolf pack is as menacing as ever.