Does Luxon share Sir John Key’s wilful blindness on China?
I’ve been leading my family on a long march through the eastern swath of North America. They are loving it. Along the way I picked Malcolm Gladwell’s 2019 book Talking to Strangers and thanks to ongoing blizzards, knocked it out in short order rather than sightseeing.
Gladwell’s premise is that we can misinterpret what people are saying because we ‘‘default to truth’’. We assume that if someone presents in a certain way and what they say is consistent with the way they present, that they are being honest.
However, this creates an opening for the deliberately deceitful, who can trick even sophisticated interrogators when their actions and words appear in alignment, but whose intentions are dishonest. He cites Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister who engaged actively with his German counterpart in the prelude to World War II.
Chamberlain looked for clues in the body language and behaviour of the Nazi leader and, Gladwell claims, when his words matched that behaviour Chamberlain assumed Hitler was being honest.
Con artists, strippers and real estate agents, I should point out, understood this well before Gladwell did, but as I was reading this excellent publication, I also read the latest opinion piece by Sir John Key on the People’s Republic of China.
He is emerging as our greatest Sinophile since Rewi Alley.
Sir John chuckles that he receives Christmas cards from the totalitarian dictator Xi Jinping. ‘‘He calls me a friend and I think he sort of means that,’’ he gushed in a 2021 interview with Guyon Espiner and declined to declare that Xi was an authoritarian leader in a recent interview with Jack Tame.
In his recent column he starts with a rhetorical
question. ‘‘Ask most New Zealanders what they think about trade with China, and chances are they will say something like: ‘If we could just sell a lamb chop to everyone in China, we would run out of sheep’.’’
Some, however, might wonder about the morality of doing trade with a nation that is accused of engaging in genocide. Key does not address this in his column.
The former prime minister remains a powerful political statesman on the national stage, is understood to be advising Chris Luxon, and his role as the chairman of our largest financial institution means his views carries weight both here and abroad.
Key’s decision to write in positive terms about China without confronting the genocide claim raises a legitimate question about his objectivity. He demonstrates what can at best be described as wilful blindness when it comes to an analysis on the situation in China and does not refer, except obliquely, to the allegations of genocide.
It is true that, under Xi and his immediate predecessors, China has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty but the reasons China is poor is thanks in part to the crimes against humanity and economics of past Communist leaders. The mountains of corpses created by the Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution and barbarity of the one-child policy have left a demographic and economic scar on the largest nation on earth.
Parliament, in a moment of rare unity, unanimously passed a resolution condemning the human rights abuses being perpetrated against the Uyghur. Key’s persistent and consistent statements undermines the force of Parliament’s declaration. Key is in a unique position. He has dined with Xi, the most powerful individual on the planet. He receives Christmas cards from him. He is a trusted courtier in the forbidden palace. There are few humans alive who could resist the pull of that siren.
In writing of the deception of Neville Chamberlain, Gladwell concludes that ‘‘Chamberlain would have been better off never meeting Hitler at all. He should have stayed at home and read Mein Kampf.’’
Luxon refuses to be interviewed by me, and quite rightly. I am a third-rate scribe with a questionable past and no future, but perhaps a real journalist can ask the current National leader if he shares his friend’s sanguine view of the current holder of the mandate of heaven.
Key’s decision to write in positive terms about China without confronting the genocide claim raises a legitimate question about his objectivity.
What do you think? Email sundayletters @stuff.co.nz