Toeing Beijing’s line up through the end of his assignment, Liu Xiaoming — China’s ambassador to the United Kingdom — will soon be stepping down. The move was announced last week at a session of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee.

The story of his tenure is, in some part, the story of the two countries’ bilateral ties. The 64-year-old diplomat, who took up his post in 2010, has served a longer tour than many Chinese diplomats do. He oversaw relations with the United Kingdom through the so-called “golden era” of Sino-British relations and as that partnership unraveled over the past year.

For years it seemed that enticing investment opportunities would lead to stronger relations between London and Beijing. As recently as 2019, when the Trump administration initially leaned on the Johnson government to ban Huawei from its telecom networks, British officials rebuffed efforts to disrupt its dealings with China. When the U.K. government approved Huawei’s participation in Britain’s 5G network earlier this year, Donald Trump accused Boris Johnson of “betrayal.”

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But in the second half of 2020, all of that changed. As COVID-19 revealed the lengths to which Beijing was willing to go to deceive the world about a deadly disease, the Chinese Communist Party deployed all manner of disinformation and aggressive “Wolf Warrior” diplomacy to get its way. The Party leadership attempted to gaslight the world about the virus’s origins. All the while, it accelerated its crackdown on pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong, and new revelations about CCP-perpetrated atrocities in Xinjiang emerged. Britain, like the rest of the world, started to see the Party for what it truly is, and efforts at engagement gave way to a push to prevent Beijing from doing further damage.

As Liu rounded out what will be the last stretch of his assignment, the British government moved to ban Huawei from its networks, offered citizenship to some 3 million Hong Kongers fleeing Beijing’s reach, and started to speak up about the CCP’s crimes against the Uighurs and other ethnic minorities in China.

To some extent, Liu’s diplomacy was shaped by the political constraints with which he worked. He also seemed to relish the combat. In a July press conference where he addressed the U.K.’s moves on Hong Kong and Huawei, his remarks took on a foreboding tone: “We want to be your friends and partners. But if you want to make China a hostile country, you have to bear the consequences.”

Liu’s pugnacious defenses of his government previewed the Wolf Warrior furor to come, but the shortcomings of that style were revealed when Beijing’s actions in Xinjiang came under scrutiny. Appearing on a British television program, he was confronted with footage of blindfolded individuals — said to be Uighur prisoners — being loaded onto trains. He told the host, the BBC’s Andrew Marr, that the video was fake, the work of Western intelligence services, and he floundered in his attempts to answer follow-up questions. He convinced no one as clips of the interview went viral, putting on full display the hollow denials of the CCP’s senior leadership.

Then, the ambassador’s legacy took a farcical turn a few months later when his Twitter account “liked” a pornographic tweet. Liu, of course, claimed that he’d been hacked.

This top CCP envoy prepares to step down, not as a representative of a regime with which any sort of “normal” engagement is possible, but as the voice of an authoritarian menace, a laughingstock in his own right.