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It seems very strange that a foreign minister to an English-speaking country cannot speak English — when his only (?) job is to interact with and understand foreigners.
Why doesn't the Chinese foreign minister speak English? Is there any historical precedent to this?
Speaking English is obviously not a prerequisite for the job, however, China's foreign minister Wang Yi is said to "speak perfect English but has a low-key public profile and rarely talks to foreign reporters." He also worked in the Chinese embassy in Washington, including as ambassador from 2000-2004.
He is one of China's leading experts on their major regional rival, Japan. China and Japan are currently locked in a major territorial dispute over a group of islands in the East China Sea. He was previously a Chinese diplomat in Tokyo, and is said to speak Japanese like a native. He was likely chosen for the post due to his reputation as a "brilliant and urbane diplomat", known for some shrewd and clever negotiation tactics.
It is common for government representatives to travel with translators-- so much so that it is newsworthy if one purposefully omits their interpreter (e.g. 1, 2). This is often because the interpreter can take notes or transcribe the meeting. And further, even when government representatives do speak English, sometimes they prefer to respond in their native language to minimize the chance of misunderstandings between the two parties (as Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto did in his conversation with US President Donald Trump).
There was a Daily Show segment about some of the difficulties of translating foreign leaders. One of the people featured was an English to Japanese translator who pointed out that even if you directly translated Trump's infamous "Grab them by the [blank]" directly into Japanese, there is no way to possibly translate the crudeness of that statement in English to Japanese. They don't really have crude ways of discussing those parts. A good translator will have to understand both the cultural and literal meaning of a phrase and know how to parse it.
Even with translators, this can go wrong. Nikita Khrushchev's famous "We will bury you speech" was a peace speech and never meant to be threatening. However, the use of the phrase as quoted was used in a context that is more of mourning capitalism as a dead economic system in the same way one would mourn an elderly person at their interment. In the west, the phrase is typically threatening in the context of a metaphoric use... typically the speaker will bury you because he also killed you. This is to say nothing of "Kuzma's Mother" which does have an actual meaning but was so archaic the translator had no idea what it meant. It would be the equivalent if someone used the English phrase "I bight my Thumb at thee". Yes, it's a threat, but is so archaic, even native speakers have a hard time parsing the exact meaning of what was just said.
