New Zealand’s prime minister has been fed a steady drip of treats and belly-rubs from China in return for rolling over and sitting up for the past two years. Now that she’s soiled the carpet, the rolled-up newspaper is out in a flash.
Beijing has lashed out at Jacinda Ardern and Scott Morrison for making “irresponsible remarks” after the Tasman leaders demonstrated their broad alignment on China policy at a leaders meeting in Queenstown.
Ardern’s willingness to trash New Zealand’s oldest and closest relationship in order to curry favour with China became clear at the Pacific Islands Forum in 2019. Ardern snarked that “Australia has to answer to the Pacific” and that New Zealand expected other nations to drastically curtail their emissions.
Notably, Ardern said nothing about the world’s single largest CO2 emitter – also present at the Forum.
Ardern’s government later refused to put its name to joint statements by other allies on China’s abuses in Hong Kong. The government also watered down an ACT party parliamentary motion on Xinjiang, erasing the word “genocide”.
Beijing must have thought it had New Zealand bought-and-paid-for – until now.
In China’s first official response to the meeting, foreign ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin scolded the two prime ministers for raising concerns about Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the South China Sea in their joint statement.
The Australian
Ardern’s about-face is certainly welcome – but will it last?
As an Australian 60 Minutes report showed, many in New Zealand business circles especially are terrified of upsetting the 1,000-pound trade gorilla. Then again, so were – and are – many in Australia. Academics, too, have an ideological soft spot for the communist giant.
And they’re doing their best impersonations of being Beijing’s fifth columnists.
But we hear from many influential Australians that our falling out with Beijing has resulted substantially from our failure to “engage”[…]
For instance, a fortnight ago Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox, himself a former diplomat, urged the government to deploy “negotiation, commonsense and diplomacy” with China. And Warwick Smith, who chairs the Business Council of Australia’s China leadership group, said: “I’ve been in and out of China for many, many years, and it shouldn’t be as bad as it is.”
But, many Australian exporters have found, apparently to their surprise, that there are other markets in the world. Ones that don’t undermine the nation and continuously hold a diplomatic knife to the government’s throat. Australia’s university sector is still weeping for its dried-up river of gold from Chinese students but, at this stage, why should anyone care? One suspects that many New Zealanders wouldn’t exactly shed a tear if many of their current academics went out of business, too.
Most importantly, New Zealand’s government and business leaders need to grasp exactly what they are dealing with, when they bend over to China.
What’s happening with China goes way beyond loose lips or protocol. And it’s affecting the whole world. It’s not an “Australian issue”. Concerns about China’s debt-diplomacy were at the fore as Samoa’s first female prime minister, Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, was sworn in last Thursday.
Australia’s Ambassador to China, Graham Fletcher, describes China as “vindictive”. With good reason: China has jailed Australian Yang Hengjun on unspecified charges of “espionage”. Similarly, China detained two Canadian citizens in 2019, in a blatant act of hostage-taking as retaliation for the arrest of a Huawei executive for bank fraud in Canada.
Two friends of mine also are in Chinese jails. Australian Cheng Lei, a convivial business host at state TV station CGTN, has been held for 10 months in a Beijing prison on bewildering claims of leaking state secrets. She has not been allowed to speak to her two young children or to a lawyer.
ABC journalist Bill Birtles[…]“was brought into the room blindfolded, masked and handcuffed by four guards, two of whom were wearing full PPE hazmat suits. She was made to sit in a chair with a wooden restraint affixed across her lap,” before blindfold and mask were removed.
This is the reality of what Australia and New Zealand are dealing with. As former Australian deputy prime minister John Anderson has said, “We should have never have lost our understanding of the simple fact that a communist is a communist. In the end, a communist will behave as a communist does”.
The world has entered uncharted waters. Powerful countries have taken troubling turns before, but never one so globally engaged economically, so single-mindedly and effectively controlled, and so determined to create a new international order.
We should pay close attention rather than pursue heated arguments among ourselves, which broadly furthers Beijing’s aims.
The Australian
The Morrison government has held admirably firm in the face of China’s bullying. Our exporters are finding new markets.
Jacinda Ardern’s government, having rediscovered something resembling a backbone and a moral compass, must hold fast.
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