China sees an opportunity – created by US President Donald Trump and the global chaos he is creating – to influence New Zealand’s actions in the world, according to an expert on the Chinese Communist Party.
“If you’re a propagandist sitting in Beijing, Trump is the gift you never thought you’d get,” says Sam Chetwin George, a senior fellow at the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations in New York.
China has been issuing more critical statements about New Zealand in the past year or so, coinciding with a realignment in New Zealand’s foreign policy towards a traditional, US-led security framework.
But with Trump’s disregard for international rules, New Zealand could be feeling more exposed, says George.
George is a Kiwi: he was a New Zealand Prime Minister’s Scholar, learning Mandarin in Taiwan, and he also studied at Oxford and Stanford. He recently published a piece in Foreign Affairs magazine about how Beijing is making the most of this “age of anarchy”.
“The New Zealand economy is in difficulty,” George says. “We’re facing an energy crisis. Our manufacturing base is at risk. The global economy is not looking great, and so it might just be that [China thinks] there’s strategically an opening to apply pressure in a way that might be more effective now.”
Earlier this year, China sharply criticised New Zealand’s participation in a United Nations sanctions-monitoring mission focused on North Korea, and put a travel ban on four New Zealand MPs who visited Taiwan, a self-governing island that Beijing considers part of its territory.
It has also been encroaching further into the Pacific diplomatically, economically, and militarily. Last year, a Chinese naval task force group conducted live fire exercises in the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand. Last month, Beijing launched a nuclear-capable missile into the nuclear-free South Pacific.
Still, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is casting himself as the stable alternative to the unpredictable Trump.
The Chinese Communist Party has long portrayed the US as bullying, hegemonic, greedy and expansionist – and Trump is proving some of those stereotypes, George says.
Beijing is now benefiting from the geopolitical rivalry between the world’s two superpowers, which is playing out in public.
“Countries like New Zealand are in the unenviable position of having to navigate that.”
A recent survey from the Asia NZ Foundation found that, for the first time in a decade, Kiwis are more likely to see China as a friend than the United States. Similar trends were reported in a Pew Research survey of 36 countries, which found views of China have improved while opinions of the US have worsened, to the point where China is now seen more positively than the US.
So is China the guardian of stability in the world?
“Of course they’re not,” George says. “They’re like any big power: they are focused on their own interests and they’re focused on their own objectives.”
But they’re just being smarter about it. For example, the way Beijing is funding and supporting Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.
“America is so overt in its military adventurism, and China has just very carefully and very cleverly, I think, kept its support at a level that’s plausibly deniable,” he says.
Xi is “obsessed with strength” and returning China to what he sees as its rightful position in the world as a great civilisation and a great country, George says. That means cementing the absolute leadership of the Chinese Communist Party but also challenging the leadership of the US, its principal adversary in the world.
This Saturday episode of The Detail is made with funding from the Peter M. Acland Foundation.
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