NEW DELHI: Diplomats driving a hard bargain isn’t unusual but when the negotiators are Chinese, there’s a twist to the story. While negotiators of other countries bargain in their national interest, their counterparts from China keep only the interests of the Chinese Communist Party in mind. The law in China demands that diplomats or civil servants are not politically neutral but have to be politically aligned, says former foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale. And that sometimes does not make the Chinese diplomats amenable to logic or reason, he told StratNews Global Editor-in-Chief Nitin A. Gokhale, talking about his new book ‘The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India’.
