An increasingly uncomfortable bedfellow
China’s new ‘normal’ is forcing NZ to tread carefully in their dealings, says ex-diplomat Ford Hart.
Last month’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress has given us a clearer idea of China’s future. Governance is personalised around a supreme leader for the first time in nearly a half century, and policy guidance is to double down on everything: greater control at home, greater selfreliance, sterner assertiveness elsewhere.
This ‘‘new era’’ will last at least another decade and possibly the rest of ‘‘People’s Leader’’ Xi Jinping’s life.
How does New Zealand now chart a path forward in its relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? Given Kiwi dependence on China, the answer must be – carefully.
Nonetheless, several trends will emerge over the years ahead.
First, New Zealanders will accept the PRC has turned a page. The reforming, gradually opening China of 20, 15, even 10 years ago is gone. This isn’t too surprising: the more open PRC was always going against the grain of what a Leninist regime could tolerate. Xi’s restoration of the party to its central role in everything is arguably more ‘‘normal’’ than that period of openness.
Second, New Zealand’s dependence on the Chinese market will come at an increasing cost to its humanity. Before Xi Jinping, Beijing sometimes paid lip service to universal human rights. Today, it officially denies their existence. The CCP is suppressing indigenous peoples, their cultures and their languages across the country, not merely in Xinjiang.
Beijing locks up women’s rights activists, and the new politburo lacks even the token female member of recent decades.
These conditions are likely to spiral downward, as repression sparks resistance, inviting further repression. Kiwis will become increasingly uncomfortable with their PRC bedfellow.
Third, it will become clearer that Beijing challenges not merely New Zealand’s values but also its practical interests. The PRC has already conducted cyberattacks on Aotearoa, sought to corrupt its political process, threatened its vital trade routes and attempted covertly to exploit the vulnerabilities of its Pacific Island neighbours.
The party leadership that did all of this has just emerged triumphant from the congress, so there is little reason to assume it will somehow abandon such initiatives.
The cost of access to Beijing’s market will be not merely muted criticism of CCP human rights abuses but also gingerly handling of violations of New Zealand’s most hard-nosed interests.
Fourth, the vulnerability of Aotearoa’s economic relationship with the PRC will become clearer. Under Xi, it is official policy to deepen China’s self-reliance, especially in agriculture, and in turn boost the world’s dependence on the PRC.
The wine, dairy products and meat Kiwis sell to China face an uncertain future. Moreover, the US$12 billion in goods New Zealand sold the PRC last year was a trivial portion of the US$2.07 trillion the mainland imported globally. China simply does not need Aotearoa.
With party diktat making an unapologetic revival in the PRC marketplace, New Zealand is vulnerable not merely to retaliation for Kiwi candour but also to factors that might have nothing directly to do with it at all, such as changes in dietary policy, investment or domestic production capacity.
A one-third foreign trade dependence on any single market is a vulnerability, and diversifying markets is never easy.
It is noteworthy, therefore, that New Zealand’s engagement with China has become more guarded over the last decade: few now assert a special relationship with the PRC founded on the ‘‘Four Firsts’’, and Wellington has become somewhat more critical of Chinese human rights abuses and overseas misbehaviour.
Nonetheless, in the absence of PRC steps that close China’s market to New Zealand, a dramatic change in Kiwi policy towards Beijing seems unlikely.
In November 2014, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel asked what drove Australia’s engagement with China, Tony Abbott famously quipped, ‘‘greed and fear’’. Kiwis will increasingly worry the same is true of New Zealand.