Power of China
of Chinese community leaders and New Zealand politicians, National MP Jami-Lee Ross gave his government’s backing for the One China policy.
More famously, National MP Jian Yang was found to have taught in a Chinese spy school although he denied that he had been a spy himself. Labour MP Raymond Huo translated the campaign slogan ‘‘Let’s do it’’ into a similar line from Xi Jinping for Chinese voters. A Labour candidate who was not elected in 2017, Naisi Chen, was president of the New Zealand Chinese Students and Scholars Association, which Brady describes as ‘‘one of the main means the Chinese authorities use to guide Chinese students and scholars’’ abroad.
Brady also noticed how many former National politicians were on the boards of Chinese banks. Don Brash, Jenny Shipley, Ruth Richardson and Chris Tremain’s names stand out.
‘‘Why have they been invited?’’ Brady asks. ‘‘With nine years of a National government, why did we see predominantly senior National MPs on these Chinese state-owned entities?’’ The answer is obvious: proximity to power.
THE VIEW FROM THE SOUTH
These are the titles of books that Brady has published about China: Friend of China – The Myth of Rewi Alley, Making the Foreign Serve China: Managing Foreigners in the People’s Republic, Marketing Dictatorship: Propaganda and Thought Work in Contemporary China and, in 2017, China as a Polar Great Power.
The latter is specifically about China’s ambitions at the North and South Poles, which are among its new strategic frontiers. Other frontiers include cyberspace, marine territories, the seabed and outer space.
You could argue that Brady’s work is also about perspectives, views from the other end of the telescope. How does the world look from China? How does the world look from New Zealand? It was the same impulse that led her to travel to North Korea in 2005 to see how the world looked from Pyongyang.
When China looks out at the world, it feels contained by US troops in South Korea, Japan, Guam and Hawaii and feels that much of the world’s media is hostile to it.
‘‘From China’s point of view, it is returning to its rightful place in global affairs,’’ Brady says. And New Zealand?
We live in paradise, Brady says unironically. It certainly feels like that on a quiet, leafy university campus on a sunny day. We have a good environment, a stable society based on the rule of law, trust in our political institutions. Armed conflict has been absent since the 19th century. There is relative innocence.
‘‘It’s becoming more and more clear that this is a really good vantage point from which to be looking out at the world.’’
The danger is that our world view can also breed complacency and passivity. We have it good. What future do we need to think about? Maybe the seas will rise a little and the summers will get drier, but otherwise fine. Geopolitics seems so far away.
In other words, are we like communist Albania, living in a kind of national delusion? Brady reports that after Chinese Premier Li Keqiang visited in 2017, a Chinese diplomat ‘‘favourably Financial Times