Prime Minister Chris Hipkins meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Pool Photo / Nathan McKinnon, RNZ
The Chinese government rolled out the red carpet for Chris Hipkins in late June – a ceremonial honour denied US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken only a fortnight earlier.
It was an indication that, when Beijing looks at New Zealand, it does not see a state in lockstep with Washington.
The trip was a major success with deals on trade, agriculture, forestry, education, flights and science and innovation signed. New Zealand was feted by China’s President, Xi Jinping, as a “friend and partner”.
Moreover, Chinese State media lauded NZ for its “strategic autonomy”, calling it an example for other Western nations to follow. The clear takeaway: follow Wellington’s example in not having a military treaty with the US (NZ is the only Western nation that doesn’t) and rewards abound.
Economically, it’s difficult to criticise the trip’s outcomes given the cost of living is high and we’ve now fallen into recession. It doesn’t pay to bite the hand (or foreign market) that feeds.
Indeed, China’s importance continues to grow, now accounting for a massive 37 per cent of NZ’s exports.
Rather than diversify or “de-risk” away from the Chinese market as many other developed economies are doing, NZ is headed in the opposite direction. It’s undeniable that warm NZ-China ties help satisfy one of our key strategic interests – trade.
Yet we also have a core strategic interest in a stable Indo-Pacific region. Here, China is found wanting.
If our friendship with Beijing is to be sustained and even strengthened, we should want more. We should seek a relationship beyond narrow economic transactionalism and ask China to take our security interests seriously.
This gets to the issue of “linkage” – of a NZ-China relationship in which progress on both economic and security interests are considered. If tangible headway can be made between NZ and China on security issues, then perhaps our model relations can contribute to the broader de-escalation of tensions between Western states and Beijing.
This would be in China’s self-interest given many nations throughout the Indo-Pacific are, in the face of China’s assertive activities and military expansion, deepening their ties to Washington.
There are areas where we should seek tangible progress.
The first relates to the undersea arena. Australia via the AUKUS trilateral security pact is going to acquire nuclear-powered submarines in coming decades. A critical reason for this is that any future war in the Indo-Pacific will take place at sea where sea lines of communication and undersea internet cables are extremely vulnerable.
Security experts will quietly say that China has mapped these undersea cables. Its submarines are patrolling the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of many nations – including New Zealand.
Being present in NZ’s EEZ also offers a position for Chinese submarines to outflank the naval forces of US and Australian navies in the event of a military crisis or war.
In other words, NZ’s broader (sea) territory is geostrategically important to the Indo-Pacific great game.
This is likely a reason NZ is now deploying four P-8 Poseidon aircraft. Our government exclusively touts these as surveillance and search and rescue planes – which they are. But they are also anti-submarine warfare platforms and will be interoperable with Australian and US forces – they will be talking to the US and Australian militaries in the event of conflict, and our acquisition of them indicates that our leaders are concerned about China’s submarine activities.
As such, we should ask for transparency regarding China’s military moves in our EEZ and whether they are operating in our direct territorial waters.
Then, there is Taiwan – a renegade province that, according to Beijing, must be reunified with the mainland peacefully if possible, or militarily if necessary.
Peaceful reunification is extremely unlikely in the foreseeable future given three-quarters of Taiwanese now feel more Taiwanese than Chinese – a significant change from just a decade ago.
China has been surging its military activities around the island in recent months – signalling to the world that we should take their intentions to absorb the island extremely seriously.
Some Kiwis might wonder why they should care about Taiwan. There are a few reasons.
Firstly, Taiwan is, like us, a small liberal democracy. Were it to be reincorporated into China by force it would be an immense blow – and one much greater than Russia’s current war of aggression against Ukraine – to the international rules-based order.
Albeit imperfect, this order is viewed by the NZ government as vital for ensuring the security of small states like NZ.
The alternative is a world where the most powerful states use military power more often to achieve their ends. Indeed, the New Zealand Government has officially just declared that the world is presently heading in this direction.
A war would also end NZ-China trade virtually overnight unless, miraculously, Wellington was willing to continue allowing seaborne trade to continue to China.
Never mind that US President Joe Biden has pledged to defend the island should China invade and the risks this would pose to naval transit.
In this context, NZ should publicly urge China to reduce its military activities around the island. This might sound presumptuous but there is a logic – for Beijing, it would be a profound signal to the entire region that it will not resort to the military option.
Naturally, in turn, NZ should call for Wellington to guarantee it will respond in a similar fashion to a change in China’s policy.
A virtuous spiral of confidence-building measures could result.
Lastly, China is pursuing a massive military and nuclear buildup. The latter is at odds with our anti-nuclear credentials.
Some will retort: “Well, Russia and the US have thousands of nuclear missiles, so why shouldn’t China?” Fair question but two (in this case three) wrongs don’t make a right, and if we in NZ believe a more nuclearised world is one that undermines our security, we should make this clear to all nuclear powers expanding their arsenals – including China given it is pursuing the largest nuclear buildup of any of the major powers.
Perhaps it’s delusional for NZ to hope Beijing will take our concerns in the aforementioned areas seriously. We are a small state, after all, and China is an emerging superpower. Yet, like Beijing, we have security interests too – and in a range of areas China is implicated.
Our friendship should count for something more than just trade.
- Dr Reuben Steff is a senior lecturer at the University of Waikato, where he teaches New Zealand foreign policy, international relations and global security.
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