How and when Mr. Xi reads about these broadsides remains a mystery to outsiders. Translating Mr. Trump’s sarcasm — “Nice!” — could be tricky. But Chinese officials and the state news media want Mr. Trump to know that their leaders prefer doing diplomacy the old-fashioned way, behind closed doors and muffled in platitudes.
Xinhua, the state news agency, has more or less asked Mr. Trump to shut up. “An obsession with ‘Twitter foreign policy’ is undesirable,” read the headline of a Xinhua commentary on Tuesday about Mr. Trump’s posts.
“Everyone recognizes the common sense that foreign policy isn’t child’s play, and even less is it like doing business deals,” said the article, published after Mr. Trump’s latest barbed comments on China.
“Twitter shouldn’t become an instrument of foreign policy,” the article said. Earlier that day, a spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs rejected Mr. Trump’s accusation that Beijing had coddled North Korea.
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