For most people, on most issues, there’s a red line somewhere that you can draw and will not cross. But where we draw that line will depend on circumstances - on our stage of life, on the person or issue involved, personal experience, our beliefs or any number of mitigating factors. Although we live in absolute and often unforgiving times, the truth is that our red lines are often quite rightly surrounded by grey.
Something accepted in a time of war could get you a prison sentence in peacetime. An act seen as awful when committed by a person with social power might be excused if committed by an oppressed minority. Something as simple as a hug can be kind or abusive. You get my drift.
The principle is much the same when it comes to a country’s foreign policy. We live in an imperfect world where neither we nor the countries or leaders we deal with are flawless. So where do we draw the line? Which standards can be compromise on and which are non-negotiable?
When a country steps out of line, do we boycott and protest as we did with South Africa under apartheid or do stay close and speak our truths more carefully (if at all), as we have with France and the US, even as so-called efforts again terrorism have led them to, respectively, blow up a boat without cause here in New Zealand and blow up an entire country without cause in the Middle East.
No country poses more of a quandary for New Zealand in this regard than China. Certainly, leaders of our traditional allies are suggesting New Zealand needs to re-think its attitude to China and are worried, as Donald Trump’s former National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has put it, that we are giving China and the CCP “coercive power” over our economy.
New Zealand has bet heavily on China in recent decades as it has re-emerged as first a regional and now a global power. As a country, we gambled on backing China’s tentative steps into capitalism and the world order that goes with it. We negotiated the famous “four firsts” with China:
New Zealand was the first country to support China’s accession to the WTO.
New Zealand was the first developed country to recognise China as a market economy under the WTO.
New Zealand was the developed country (minor or major) to start negotiating an FTA with China.
New Zealand was the first developed country (minor or major) to sign and ratify an FTA with China.
China has gone from just our fourth largest trading partner in 2008 to comfortably our largest today. In that time two-way trade has quadrupled to $32 billion. We have put a lot of eggs in China’s basket and even Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta is urging New Zealand business to diversify.
The hope has been that as China opened up its economy, so would it open up its thinking and we would see new freedoms and rights alongside new markets. But under President Xi Jinping the opposite has happened. Xi’s CCP has clamped down on dissent to the point where it will be hard for countries like ours having to make some hard decisions in the not too distant future.
These are the issues at the heart of the podcast series Red Line, hosted by Guyon Espiner and John Daniell, and that I helped produce. Having investigated our traditional allies in last year’s podcast, The Service, this year the same team have been taking a long, hard look at China.
We’ve long heard Prime Ministers affirm that they have raised human rights abuses with Chinese leaders, as if that was worthy of a pat on the back and amounted to holding to some line. Perhaps a decade or two ago when we saw China as on a path to greater freedoms and maybe even democracy, that was sufficient. As we saw the 800 million people lifted from poverty in a single generation, the world accepted a certain amount of collateral damage; that level of growth and redistribution of wealth was historic and, while it came at a price, it was hard to argue against China’s remarkable, poverty-busting trajectory.
The question posed in the podcast is how much that’s all changed. Because New Zealand’s attitude and foreign policy hasn’t. We are still betting on China even as many of our traditional allies back away.
Former Prime Minister John Key is a friend of Xi’s and remains impressed by his vision and scale of success. Key makes the point that you never get more influence over a friend by walking away from them. You can only urge a country to do better if you’re talking and have a relationship. And anyway, could we seriously walk away from our biggest trading partner without massive harm to our own people?
Key says stay close, demand better. Don’t turn a blind eye, but don’t cut off your nose to spite your face. And anyway, no-one we trade or ally with is perfect. And he’s right. America has overthrown governments, invaded countries and empowered dictators. Australia has a terrible record of mistreating its indigenous peoples. Japan has a terrible record of imperialism, not to mention some worryingly prejudice traditions. And those are just our three other largest trading partners. And no-one’s suggesting we back away from any of them.
But Key’s arguments sounded more acceptable in 2011; a decade on and the current government is facing the question of whether our approach is fast reaching its use-by date.
Xi has used an anti-corruption campaign to remove opponents and make himself, essentially, president for as long as he wants to be. The Chinese Communist Party is building a vast surveillance and propaganda state. It is passing laws in Hong Kong that is seeing its ‘special status’ dissolve before our eyes.
China has an estimated million Uighurs and other minority groups in massive internment camps in Xinjiang, forcing them to read and accept party doctrine. Some are forced into slave labour. There is testimony of forced sterilisation and torture. All this China denies, but the evidence is overwhelming.
Then there’s organ harvesting. Geoffrey Nice QC’s 2018 Uighur Tribunal showed Chinese officials killing prisoners for their organs, skin and more. Nice compared the harvesting to atrocities in Rwanda and Nazi Germany and said anyone doing business with the China today must accept they are doing business with “a criminal state”.
Many people spoken to for this series drew comparisons with Germany under Adolf Hitler. Is China just cutting some corners, does the good outweigh the bad, and does the wealth China bring make the world a better place? Or is it more like 1930s Germany, with the world standing by saying ‘it’s not that bad… we can’t get involved… they wouldn’t, would they?’. Is Key’s attitude akin to the Mitfords and others who chose to see Hitler’s rebuilding of a broken country as his defining policy, not what he was doing to minority groups or in his military factories.
With China, we know what it is doing, for good but also for ill. We cannot pretend it is still 2011 and China is what it was then or in the earlier years of the century, where it seemed reform and human rights may be inching forward. The point of Red Line is to wake us up and start us recognising the reality of China today - the possibilities and opportunities that Key and others speak to and the horror and grand-scale abuse that others report.
Whichever side you choose to stand, the time is coming when we will have to draw a line. Where and when would you draw it?