As Pacific Island foreign ministers meet, that Chinese missile will be top of the agenda

It’s Monday again (how did that come around so fast?) which means it’s time for my recommendations and a preview of the week.

This week is going to be an interesting one for me because I’m heading to Suva on Thursday for the Pacific Islands Forum foreign ministers’ meeting. It’s coming at a very sensitive time given China’s decision to launch a nuclear-capable missile into the nuclear-free waters of the South Pacific, and amid a new frenzy of diplomacy in the region as China pays more and more attention to it.

More on what to expect from that below. But first.

• This is a wild story, from the great team at Rest of World: People in China can now get paid US$15 to US$700 to license their faces for AI-generated entertainment production. It’s an attempt at a legal solution to what Chinese internet users are calling “face theft” — when ordinary people discover traits of their faces used in AI-generated content without permission.

  A growing number of online platforms are paying people anywhere between $15 and $700 to license their likeness for AI-generated content. The platforms have created catalogs of images — either uploaded by users or taken at designated studios — where producers can browse faces by gender, age, or category such as “girl-next-door,” “rugged,” or “supermodel.” They can also filter candidates based on the genre they are casting, whether it’s a thriller, comedy, or romance.

  The story also describes the Chinese-born trend of “micro dramas” — very melodramatic episodes of soap operas, usually featuring terrible acting and crazy cliffhangers, shot vertically for phones and lasting only a minute or two per episode. These are now becoming more popular around the world. If you ever see them, you’ll probably wonder (like me) why.
  

• I also enjoyed this piece from ABC’s Media Watch about Sudan’s “forgotten war” and the lack of coverage about it. About 14 million people have been displaced and between 150,000 and 400,000 people killed. The siege of El Fasher in Darfur could have been the largest mass casualty event since World War II, rights advocates say. More than 33 million need humanitarian aid. And still the atrocities continue. Watching this clip made me feel embarrassed as a journalist. Of course we should be paying attention to Ukraine and Gaza and Iran — but we should also be devoting journalistic time and resources to this horrific event.

  

  Media Watch@ABCmediawatch

  Industrial-scale massacre struggles to compete on the nightly news. #MediaWatch

  3:22 AM · Jul 28, 2026 · 5.36K Views

  3 Replies · 10 Reposts · 35 Likes

  The New York Times’ editorial board wrote last month (gift link):

  There are many reasons that Sudan’s war is often overlooked, despite being bloodier than conflicts that receive far more attention. Sudan does not fit into larger global political debates in the ways that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East do. Africa too often is ignored by those on other continents, a reflection of both racial and economic double standards. Sudan has been so long ravaged by war that efforts to bring peace can seem pointless.

  None of these explanations are acceptable, and they feed the terrible costs of the continuing conflict.

  Those double standards were illustrated this past week when the Trump administration released a map that mislabelled every single country in Africa it cited.

• Finally, I’m obsessed with Kiwi ultra runner Sophie Woods’ incredible journey in the Alps. She’s on track to become the fastest person to complete the 2000km Via Alpina, which stretches across eight countries, from Italy to Monaco. And in a heatwave, no less. Over that course, she will climb more than 120,000 metres — the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest from sea level more than 13 times.

  The current record is held by Jake Catterall, who completed the course in 35 days and 21 hours in 2014. Sophie is on course to smash that. What an astonishing feat of human endurance and ambition.

  

Foreign ministers from around the Pacific will meet in Suva on Friday. Winston Peters is probably counting down the days until he leaves the country after the firestorm he ignited last week with his latest anti-Asian remarks.

The nuclear-capable missile that China launched into the waters off Tuvalu, into an area declared by the Treaty of Rarotonga to be a nuclear-free zone, is likely to dominate the agenda.

Australia and New Zealand both criticised the launch but the reaction across the Pacific was more muted, with Solomon Islands prime minister Matthew Wale saying the launch was “not the act of a friend” and Papua New Guinea’s James Marape “appeal[ing] to our Chinese friends that this be the last such missile test conducted in Pacific waters”.

It has also been steadily picking off Taiwan’s diplomatic allies in the region, meaning there are now only three Pacific states that have formal links with Taipei instead of Beijing: The Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Palau, which will host the leaders’ meeting in September.

I’ll report back from the forum later this week.

-anna