NZ playing ‘precarious game’ with China: Pilger
New Zealand is nearly “beckoning China as an enemy” by taking part in US military exercises on the country’s doorstep, Australian journalist and film-maker John Pilger says.
Ahead of the New Zealand premiere of his new film The Coming War on China on Wednesday night, Pilger said New Zealand was precariously placed in its dealings with the US and China.
Just last week, the Government made ambitious new economic commitments with China, now New Zealand’s biggest trading partner.
Yet New Zealand was undermining this relationship through its growing support for American provocations in the disputed South China Sea, Pilger said.
“New Zealand . . . appears to be playing a precarious game,” he told the Herald.
In July, the New Zealand Defence Force will participate in Operation Talisman Sabre, a US air-sea exercise which Pilger described as a rehearsal for blockading key shipping routes to China, the Malacca and Lombok Straits.
Operation Talisman Sabre was based on a battle plan for a war with China, and according to a US Marine Corps assessment would cause “incalculable human and economic destruction”.
“It almost seems . . . New Zealand is beckoning China as an enemy,” Pilger said.
The film, which opens in Auckland on April 6, gives a stark warning about the rising possibility of a full-scale conflict between the US and China. A nuclear war was “not unthinkable”, Pilger says at the film’s opening.
But while media and political attention has focused on China’s reclaiming of disputed islands, Pilger said there was very little reporting on the United States’ enormous, growing military presence in the Asia-Pacific region.
As part of a “pivot to Asia” under former US President Barack Obama in 2011, the US has gradually shifted naval and air force bases to the region, and more than 400 military bases now encircle China.
Despite the film’s title, a USChina war was not inevitable, he said. “But while there are flashpoints and provocations, the dangers multiply. The US has begun to install its ... anti-missile system in South Korea, ostensibly as a deterrence to North Korea. In fact, it’s aimed principally at China.” New Zealand has taken a neutral role on the South China Sea dispute, though last year Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee said China’s land reclamation was causing tension in the region — a statement which later prompted a sharp response from Beijing.