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Vanuatu's UN desk matches China's
Equal desks
Vanuatu is a tiny island nation in the South Pacific. The equal treatment is a fiction on purpose, because international relations involve far more than brawn or wealth. Respect, status, power, and dignity matter too, and the word diplomacy points at that.
Symbolic acts
Making things happen and keeping relationships stable takes an awful lot of posturing and symbolism. The author Barry O'Neill shows that there are probably 100 purely symbolic acts between countries every year.
Two leaders have dinner together. One country sends a vice president to the funeral of the other's former head of state. Countries exchange students or zoo animals, attend a ceremony to raise a flag, or formally apologize.
Why do all UN members get equal treatment?
The United Nations Charter of 1945 rests on the principle of sovereign equality of all its members. In the General Assembly, each member state gets one vote, whether it has a few hundred thousand people or more than a billion. The Security Council works differently, since five permanent members hold a veto. The Assembly's equal seating is an expression of the first principle, not the second.
How do pandas work as diplomacy?
China has used giant pandas as diplomatic gifts since at least the Tang dynasty, and records describe a pair sent to Japan in the year 685. After President Richard Nixon visited China in 1972, the country sent two pandas, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, to the National Zoo in Washington. Since the 1980s, China has loaned pandas, not given them, with annual fees. The shift turned a gift into a long-term contract.
Why did Willy Brandt kneel at Warsaw?
In December 1970, West German Chancellor Willy Brandt visited the monument to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising and knelt in silence in front of it. He had been in Poland to sign a treaty recognizing the postwar border. The gesture was not part of the prepared program. It is remembered as one of the most famous symbolic acts of modern diplomacy.