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China’s Ambassador to DRC Gets Into Online Spat With Former Trump Administration Official

by Eric Olander
TWEET TRANSLATIONS: Zhu: The Democratic Republic of Congo must not become the battleground for great powers. No one has the right to use the country, a sovereign and independent state, to satisfy its own interests. Pham: Completely agree, [your] Excellency. This is why non-transparent agreements that swap real mineral resources for inferior or non-existent infrastructure are not in the interests of society.

For the past few days, a low-grade Twitter feud has been going on between China’s ambassador to the DRC, Zhu Jing, and J. Peter Pham, a former U.S. special envoy to the Sahel during the Trump administration and now a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based think tank The Atlantic Council.

The back-and-forth started on Friday when Zhu replied to a tweet by the former U.S. official, who accused the Chinese of being complicit in illegal mining in South Kivu which then prompted the Chinese ambassador to say, without evidence, that an American company was also implicated:

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