When Xi Jinping (left) calls Vladimir Putin his ‘best friend’, it’s clear where New Zealand’s loyalties should lie. Photo / AP
OPINION:
If your business depends on China, it’s time to roll out Plan B. The main mission of MBIE, NZTE and Tourism NZ should be helping you.
New Zealand wasn’t alone in becoming too dependent on the authoritarian and expansionist superpower, but was the most naive.
In retrospect, China’s interest in New Zealand was always to infiltrate, subvert and make dependent the weakest member of the Five Eyes alliance.
China flattered us with trade deals, high-level attention, by buying our commodity milk powder, barely processed logs and low-value hamburger patties and selling us cheap dual-purpose electronics. Other easy cash came from cheap package tourists and students who weren’t accepted by any other English-speaking university.
Meanwhile, China busily bought influence in our region and penetrated our major institutions, including our two main political parties, bureaucracy and business groups. The long-term goal was detaching us from the democracies, bringing us under its economic and diplomatic control and gaining access to Five Eyes secrets in the meantime.
Adolescently, we boasted that going along with this demonstrated an “independent” foreign policy.
There’s no such thing. Foreign policy, especially for small countries, is about interdependence. The idea of New Zealand running a foreign policy somehow “independent” of Australia, our closest neighbour and only formal ally, is not even coherent.
Like his nine immediate predecessors, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins and his senior diplomats know this, even as politics demands they incant the slogan.
Hipkins will decide this weekend whether he will accept his invitation, along with the prime ministers of Australia, Japan and South Korea, to attend this year’s Nato summit in Lithuania.
It is an election year. But just as the Prime Minister is duty-bound to make a quick trip to London next month for the King’s coronation, the security of the realm demands he make a second day-trip to Europe in July. (We can only hope against hope for a third prime-ministerial dash to Europe this year, to Paris in November, for the World Cup final.)
Declining would indicate to Australia, Nato, Japan, South Korea and China and Russia, that Hipkins is less committed than his predecessor to the collective security of the liberal democracies against authoritarianism and expansionism.
Last year in Madrid, Jacinda Ardern became the first New Zealand Prime Minister to attend a Nato summit, saying China had “become more assertive and more willing to challenge international rules and norms”. She earned the honour of a slap-down by the wannabe viceroys in the Chinese Embassy in Wellington.
This year, everything is worse, demanding even greater solidarity among the liberal democracies.
Consistent with his calling President Vladimir Putin his “best friend” and their joint declaration last year that friendship between China and Russia has “no limits” and no “forbidden areas of co-operation”, President Xi Jinping has been an unwavering supporter of Russia’s slaughter in Ukraine.
He has also announced an “unbreakable friendship” with Belarus, from which Russia invaded Ukraine, and honoured its brutal dictator Alexander Lukashenko with a 21-gun salute in Tiananmen Square.
This week, Xi’s military practised a military strike and full-scale aerial and naval blockade of Taiwan, for which it even wanted to close airspace adjacent to the democratic island for three days. Putin endorsed the exercises, claiming Taiwan provoked them.
The drill was China’s biggest ever conducted off Taiwan. Its military declared success, announcing it is “ready to fight all the time and can fight at any time, resolutely crushing any form of Taiwan independence, separatism and foreign interference”.
This is largely bluster. The US, British and French nuclear deterrents keep the liberal democracies safe. There has been no direct conflict between great powers since the Korean War, which finished before China obtained nuclear weapons.
But the bluster will keep getting worse, as will the true economics of dealing with China.
Some New Zealand business interests argue we can be defended by Australia and the US while continuing to take silver from China.
That explains the close relationship that grew between the Chinese Communist Party and the New Zealand National Party. Former National prime ministers can be relied upon to make the case for China in the New Zealand media.
As recently as September, National even portrayed China as the victim of terrorism by Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang. The more mainstream view, including in Canberra, Washington, Brussels and the Beehive, is that Beijing is trying to wipe out their culture, just as has been largely achieved in Tibet.
Those who think it’s possible to keep having it both ways are wrong. Covid was good practice, at least for those marketing consumer goods rather than peddling commodities. But an overall managed retreat from our economic entanglement with China is becoming necessary.
Disengagement is needed not just because China abuses trade rules, such as its constant efforts to steal foreign intellectual property, including New Zealand kiwifruit varieties, to make up for its creative inferiority as an authoritarian state.
It’s not because, as happened against South Africa in the 1980s or Germany in the 1930s, higher-value consumers in liberal democracies will begin punishing those doing business in China. Nor is it even because New Zealand should side, when it comes to it, with liberal democracies rather than authoritarian police states, on both prudential and moral grounds.
Ultimately, the argument for escaping China is that it will inexorably seek to complete its economic colonisation through the threat of cutting us off.
New Zealand commodity traders are pressuring the Prime Minister to lead a post-Covid trade mission to China.
He should decline. As the rules-based system collapses because of Russian, Chinese and western-populist abuse, not just New Zealand’s security but our economic interests lie with the liberal democracies that share our basic values.
Hipkins’ focus should be ratification of our new free-trade agreements with the EU and UK, and fast-tracking the latter into the CPTPP, which already includes Japan, Canada, Mexico and our closest free-trade friends.
He should lead efforts to advance President Joe Biden’s proposed Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity (IPEFP), which includes not just the US but India, Indonesia and South Korea, and would cover 40 per cent of the world economy.
It’s the only path to proper trade access to India, which is also an important check against Chinese expansionism southward.
Australia, Nato and the CPTPP and IPEFP countries are our friends, share our values, and are essential to our security — not just militarily but as reliable and law-abiding markets long term.
China offers nothing except eventual subjection. Best to get ahead of your competitors and be first to diversify.
- Matthew Hooton has previously worked for the National and Act parties, and the Mayor of Auckland.
The jury's marathon deliberations ran for two weeks.