Peter Harris writes 'After soup with Key, China is left with plenty on its plate’ in the Dominion Post.
‘After soup with Key, China is left with plenty on its plate’
by Peter Harris
(Dominion Post, 1 April 2014)
When Chinese President Xi Jinping sat down for dinner with Prime Minister John Key last week he surely breathed a sigh of relief. Here was the premier of a small, trouble-free country, easy to do business with. The latest milk powder scare was consigned to the history books, and the New Zealand dollar was set to be the sixth currency to trade directly with the renminbi. This was one more step towards the internationalisation of the Chinese currency, an important element of the marketising reforms the Chinese president has put his stamp of authority on.
Equally important from President Xi’s point of view, though not mentioned, at least in public, was New Zealand’s muted response to China’s move last November to declare an air defence identification zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea. The Chinese ADIZ took in the Diaoyu or Senkaku Islands, subject of a bitter dispute between China and Japan, and provoked a small storm of complaints and protests. But the Key government eschewed the path taken by Washington and Canberra, both of whom condemned the ADIZ. (In Canberra’s case Julie Bishop got a disagreeably sharp public rebuke for her trouble.) Wellington was thus able to avoid making a decision about whether to lean towards China or the United States – at least for the time being.
So as President Xi and Prime Minister Key ate peppery fish soup in the Great Hall of the People the Chinese leader must have relished not only the cuisine but also his easy dealings with Kiwis. He might also have been tempted to contrast these dealings with a couple of other issues relating to the world outside China that might have been on his mind at the time. Both of them were – and are – more troubling to him than botulism scares, and both of them were coming to the boil around the same time as the fish soup.
The two issues were the crisis in the Ukraine and the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370. In their different ways the two events highlight some of the external difficulties the Chinese now find themselves addressing as they adjust to an ever larger and more complex role in world affairs. And if we consider them from Beijing’s perspective we get additional insights into the Chinese world view, beyond what we can glean from a prime ministerial visit.
For the Chinese government the crisis in Ukraine raised an intriguing dilemma. On the one hand it was (and is) a case study in how things should not be done. Popular uprisings, especially those supported by the Americans and their western allies, evoke fears of externally induced ‘regime change’ of the kind Beijing has had nightmares about ever since the Tiananmen crisis in 1989. On the other hand military intervention to take over part of another state runs directly counter to China’s insistence on the primacy of national sovereignty and non-interference in other countries’ affairs – a cornerstone of China’s carefully constructed sense of national self. So even though the Chinese foreign minister recently described China’s relations with Russia as better than they have ever been, President Putin’s takeover of Crimea contradicted a basic tenet of Chinese foreign policy. That explains why Chinese comment on Crimea was guarded, and why China was driven to abstaining rather than supporting its Russian ally in the UN Security Council vote on Crimea on 15 March.
One other element of the Ukraine crisis will have struck the Chinese leadership, and that is the relatively restrained response of the United States. Here again China will see evidence of the Obama administration’s reluctance, evident most recently in Syria, to get embroiled too deeply in fresh entanglements abroad. This is a consideration Beijing will doubtless take into account when dealing with Japan, Taiwan and other contentious issues closer to home. In this sense the Ukraine crisis, like the crisis in Syria, could have a knock-on effect in our part of the world.
The fate of MH370 has also confronted China with a dilemma, but of a different kind. The loss of a plane carrying over 150 Chinese has been the first instance of a man-made disaster affecting the millions of Chinese now travelling internationally. It has highlighted the custodial role the Chinese government sees itself as playing towards Chinese citizens abroad, particularly when there is a hint of terrorism being involved. (The fact that MH370 disappeared so soon after the deadly terrorist attack in Kunming on 1 March undoubtedly raised questions about terrorism in the minds of many Chinese.) In recent years Beijing has played a protective role in incidents affecting Chinese abroad, especially in strife-torn parts of Africa. Now with MH370 it has had to play this role much closer to home.
This has resulted in untoward Chinese criticisms of Malaysia, a near neighbour that China otherwise wants to cultivate. In addition to participating in the search effort Chinese news outlets have expressed frustration and anger at the lacklustre performance of the Malaysian authorities. At one point the semi-official Xinhua news agency spoke of the Malaysians’ possible ‘dereliction of duty’ and called on the Malaysian government to ‘work more thoroughly and efficiently’. And on 17 March the pro-Beijing editor of the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong declared simply that it was ‘time for Beijing to step up and lead the operation’. In allowing the Malaysians to be criticized like this the Chinese authorities are no doubt trying to assuage popular anger, and the anger of victims’ relatives, at the Malaysians’ lacklustre handling of the MH370 tragedy. Still, they risk jeopardizing the very policy of non-interference in others’ affairs that they normally set such store by.
It seems reasonable to expect the same assertiveness in future, especially in the Asia Pacific region. The MH370 affair, and in different way the crisis in Ukraine, thus give us some striking insights into the quandaries a newly powerful China finds itself facing. They add fresh and somewhat different perspectives to the insights derived from Prime Minister John Key’s visit.
Peter Harris is Acting Director of the New Zealand Contemporary China Research Centre at Victoria University of Wellington.