Wu Zhaohua

His Excellency Wu Zhaohua
吳照華
Minister of Foreign Affairs
Incumbent
Assumed office 1 October 2012
Monarch	Hongxian Emperor
Prime Minister	Zhao Rui Yang Wenli
Preceded by	Liao Zongwu
Permanent Representative of China to the League of Nations
In office 1 February 2001 – 17 September 2008
Monarch	Hongxian Emperor
Prime Minister	Zhao Rui
Preceded by	Xiong Pei
Succeeded by	Liu Fanhui
Personal details
Born	(1949-03-21) March 21, 1949 Yibin, Sichuan Province, Chinese Empire
Children	3

Wu Zhaohua (Chinese: 吳照華, born 21 March 1949) is a Chinese career diplomat who has served as Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Qing Empire since October 2012. Previously he held many other diplomatic posts, most notably the Chinese Permanent Representative to the League of Nations from 2001 to 2008.

Early life

Wu Zhaohua was born in Yibin, a city in Sichuan province, on 21 March 1949. His father had been an official for the Imperial Government during the reign of the Guangxu Emperor, having graduated from the Hanlin Academy. During school, he was an athlete, enjoying wrestling, and his favorite class was physics. Wu originally planned to study that subject at the Imperial University of Peking, but instead ended up choosing international relations, and later attended the London School of Economics. This was around the time that China began implementing reforms and increasingly opening up to the world, with more encouragement for Chinese students to study abroad. Wu Zhaohua graduated with a master's degree in international relations and the English language, and after returning to China in 1970 he went to work for the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Service in government

Early career

He was initially assigned as an English translator at the Chinese embassy in the United Kingdom and would spend most of his career focusing on Western Europe or North America. Wu had also been given the task of analysing the political situation in the country. In 1975, Wu received a new assignment as a translator at the embassy in Brazoria. When he returning to China in 1979, Wu became a secretary at the Western European Bureau of the Foreign Office. He was also promoted to interpreter first class and translated during meetings between Chinese and English-speaking foreign politicians and diplomats.

In 1982 he was sent to China's permanent mission to the League of Nations in Geneva as a translator. In 1985 Wu received his first major post when he became China's Deputy Permanent Representative to the LN, which he held until 1989. He returned and worked at the central office of the Foreign Ministry in Beijing for several years, and in autumn 1993 he was appointed as the Chinese Ambassador to Belgium, a post that from 1 November 1993 was also accredited as the ambassador to the European Union. Wu Zhaohua would serve as China's ambassador in Brussels from then until 10 December 2000, a position in which he helped formulate the newly crowned Hongxian Emperor's policy of increasing relations with Europe from 1996. Wu also supported different projects and organisations that promoted Chinese culture and teaching the Chinese language in European nations.

LN ambassador

On 1 February 2001 Wu Zhaohua became the Chinese Permanent Representative to the League of Nations. Controversially, in November 2002 during an LN Security Council meeting regarding the situation in Iraq and Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction, Wu abstained during the voting on LN Security Council Resolution 1441. The resolution would later be used as the legal justification for the invasion of Iraq in 2003 by the Anglo-American countries. China being the only one among the fifteen permanent and non-permanent members of the Security Council to abstain from the vote was seen by observers over the next decade as the beginning of the deterioration in relations between China and the Western democracies.

Personal life

Besides his native Chinese, he also speaks fluent English and French.