Name: Inside the Power Plays of High-Stakes Diplomacy
Uploaded: 2025-11-21T16:50:44.000Z
Duration: 37 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

The comparative

It is one of the stranger idiosyncrasies of diplomacy that sometimes the biggest arguments in the run up to a meeting like this are not over the substance.

Present continuous

They're over things like, literally who is hosting the meeting, where it takes place, and

Future simple

for a phone call, things like which leader will get on the line first?

And this is all magnified tremendously with the Chinese, who are very conscious of this sort of thing.

And so you can sometimes have these standoffs where literally neither side is willing to put their head of state onto the phone until they hear that the other head of state is on the phone.