WASHINGTON DC - From Port Moresby’s founding early last century — when it was little more than a dozen corrugated iron shacks, a tennis court and McCrann’s tin-shed tavern — to the sprawling city it is today, Papua New Guinea’s capital has always been a place of intrigue and melodrama, its novelistic cast of characters drawn from near and far.
Nowadays, the largest city in the Pacific Islands is the setting for a much larger plotline, a new cold war tussle between China and the United States for presence, influence and the favour of a local political elite enjoying its moment in the sun.