How China Sabotaged The Copenhagen Summit

There's an article in the Britsh newspaper The Guardian this morning written by an insider at the recent world environment summit in Copenhagen who explains that it was actually the Chinese who blocked any real deal behind closed doors, while calculating that President Obama would be the one blamed by the outside world.

"China's strategy was simple: block the open negotiations for two weeks, and then ensure that the closed-door deal made it look as if the west had failed the world's poor once again. And sure enough, the aid agencies, civil society movements and environmental groups all took the bait... I saw Obama fighting desperately to salvage a deal, and the Chinese delegate saying 'no', over and over again...The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world's most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his 'superiors'."