Why are the people who should be most concerned about their country's reputation consistently acting in ways that undermine it?
Illustration by Sam Ward
Listen to SupChina editor-at-large and Sinica podcast host Kaiser Kuo read this article.
It was late afternoon in November 2018 when Rimbink Pato, Papua New Guinea’s foreign minister, heard a loud commotion outside his door. Seconds later, four young Chinese diplomats burst uninvited into his office, demanding last-minute changes to the communiqué of the APEC summit, the Pacific’s most important economic and political event.
The Chinese diplomats believed some of the communique’s wording about “unfair trade practices” targeted Beijing, and behind the scenes at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit, whose members represent around 60 percent of the world’s GDP, they had been wrangling for a change. Pato refused their requests for a private sit-down, arguing that bilateral negotiations with an individual delegation might jeopardize the country’s neutrality as host. But, undeterred, the four diplomats decided to push their way into the fo
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