Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was given the star treatment in the most traditional sense when he met Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on Friday.
It wasn’t the motorcade or the red carpet (although the motorcades have been impressive and, this being China, there’s a lot of red carpet).
No, it’s because when two members of the Chinese media filmed Luxon’s opening remarks with Xi and other Chinese Communist Party leaders they did so on actual film – you know film film, celluloid, the stuff you run at 24 frames per second through a camera to produce the illusion of motion.
Proper film is beautiful, but surely a bit old hat (shooting, developing etc takes hours) in an age when a digital livestream can transmit footage live from Beijing to New Zealand.
The Herald asked the cameraman what he was doing using such dated tech. He said the film was for archival purposes so “in a hundred years” there’ll still be a physical record of the meeting.
How very flattering for Luxon – the New Zealand media don’t have the same sense of longevity, not for Luxon, nor indeed for themselves.
The cameraman isn’t wrong. Physical film is still the preferred method for archiving movies. If one tiny bit of code in a digital file goes bung, the whole file can be rendered unusable. Film doesn’t have that problem. Treated right, it can last longer than a hundred years.
You’ve heard the cliches about China’s long–term thinking: there’s the apocryphal story of Premier Zhou Enlai saying that even after 200 years it was “too early to say” the impact of the French Revolution, or the well–worn phrase, “America thinks in decades, China thinks in centuries”.
Everyone got in on it. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger at the “singularity” and continuity of Chinese civilisation. Quite the compliment from history’s most inveterate regime changer.
But the cliche is at least partly true. Luxon’s meeting with Xi and number 3 Zhao Lejiz both referenced the “five decades” of the People’s Republic’s relations with New Zealand. The film cameraman suggests the country is thinking about the next 10 decades in that relationship as well.
Xi was perhaps the most blunt, saying that in the “50 years since the establishment of diplomatic ties, the China-New Zealand relationship has experienced many ups and downs, but we have always respected each other”.
That “ups and downs” line was the quote of the trip. The relationship with China is clearly in a tight spot at the moment and there was a lot of expectation placed on how the Chinese saw it. Rightly or wrongly, the New Zealand side thought the “ups and downs” line was a pretty good outcome.
Xi was never going to give Luxon the full Wolf Warrior, that’s left to more junior folk, but “ups and downs” coupled with a few friendly compliments about Luxon’s personality must be seen as a success after the challenges the relationship has endured in the last few years.
But where’s that history now? Is it up – or is it down?
Another bit of history China loves to check off with New Zealand are the “five firsts”, a quintuple of milestones that made New Zealand China’s best mate among what it calls “Western” nations.
According to state media, these firsts are: New Zealand being the first Western nation to back China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation (1997), to designate China a market economy (2004), the first to sign a free trade agreement (2008), the first to join the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (2015) and the first to sign an MoU on the Belt and Road Initiative (2017).
Xi referenced this history too, telling Luxon New Zealand had “remained for a long time at the forefront of China’s relationship with Western developed countries”.
There are a lot of “ups” in those firsts, but the last was nearly a decade ago. The most of the obviously “down” parts of the relationship have occurred in the last decade. Is Xi’s “ups and downs” language simply an obfuscation for the fact relations between the two countries have clearly worsened since the Clark-Key years?
Luxon, like so many of his predecessors, wants to have it both ways.
For New Zealand, trade is at the heart of the relationship.
In Shanghai, playing the role of New Zealand’s top dealmaker, Luxon celebrated inking hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of agreements. He was right to celebrate.
A member of the business delegation said that in China, where senior politicians are distant from people, getting the chance to meet a head of government is a big deal. Yes, it’s businesses and officials that do the hard graft on these deals, but it often takes a visit from the top to get it over the line.
In the morning of his final day, Luxon’s office touted $400 million worth of deals. Less than four hours later, they upped that figure to $871m.
Treat these figures with some scepticism. They’re often a case of officials putting big numbers together to make a bigger number. Yes, deals have been done, but Chinese consumers still have to buy what we’re selling.
An “up”, then, to borrow Xi’s phrase – but again, it’s not an unambiguous up. For a decade, exports to China registered wild growth, but now, a domestic economic crisis as seen them flatline.
No one trust’s China’s economic statistics, believing them fudged by the Chinese Communist Party.
A property crash and low consumer confidence are weighing on the country’s economy, and its ability to absorb ever greater amounts of New Zealand’s exports.
Since the pandemic, China has been a shrinking rather than growing market for our exports. Let’s hope Chinese consumers want $871m more of our stuff. There’s no guarantee.
Ironically, it’s China’s great economic rival, the United States, that has seen the greatest export growth in the last few years, thanks to its miraculous post–Covid bounceback.
Then there’s also the “down”.
Although it took until the last day of the trip for Luxon to say it most explicitly, the Government clearly takes a dim view of China’s pursuing of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership with the Cook Islands. Luxon conceded this was not just a New Zealand–Cook Islands issue, as he had been saying until Thursday. It’s a New Zealand–Cook Islands–China issue.
He raised those concerns with Premier Li Qiang on Friday. It was one of the few parts of his closed–door discussions with Chinese leaders that Luxon would speak about publicly.
He’s been incredibly cagey about discussing what was said at these meetings – much more than he is in meetings with other leaders. Chinese media seemed to think New Zealand’s flirtation with Aukus would come up. If it did, Luxon wasn’t saying anything.
Is Xi angling for a reset? He was almost effusive in his praise of Luxon. There was no coded or poetic criticism of the kind you occasionally see from Chinese leaders. He professed himself “very impressed” with the New Zealand Prime Minister.
Is he charming Luxon, the first-termer, before tightening the screws if the Government continues its Atlantic drift in a second term? Are the Chinese looking to probe differences between Luxon and his Foreign Minister Winston Peters, a lifelong China hawk?
If this was Xi’s gambit, then it didn’t work ... until it did.
Hours later, Luxon decided to reveal he’d raised New Zealand’s concerns about China’s conduct in the Pacific and the Taiwan Strait with Li, Xi’s number 2.
To raise these issues in a meeting is one thing. To draw attention to them by singling them out in a press release is another.
But minutes after that press release was issued, Luxon appeared more dovish on China than most of his immediate predecessors.
Hours before getting on a plane and heading to Nato, Luxon told media he had a fairly significant “difference of opinion” with that organisation’s secretary general, Mark Rutte, who has spoken about China co-ordinating with Russia, Iran and North Korea.
“We haven’t seen evidence of those four powers co-ordinating actively against the West,” Luxon said.
That’s quite the change of tune from his predecessors – and quite a challenge to current Nato thinking.
Nato revised its “strategic concept” – its cornerstone strategic thinking – in 2022 to name China as a challenge to global security.
New Zealand appeared to sign up to that thinking.
Attending that year’s summit in Madrid, Dame Jacinda Ardern name-checked China in her speech, saying “China has in recent times … become more assertive and more willing to challenge international rules and norms”.
Nato, never a feature of the diplomatic calendar, has been attended every year since then, despite New Zealand not being a formal member (other fora New Zealand is actually a full member of, like Apec or the United Nations General Assembly, have not been as well attended).
Is Luxon heading to Nato a newly converted China dove? Or will he risk China’s fury saying one thing in Beijing, but another when he’s standing shoulder–to–shoulder with Donald Trump next week?
The China relationship occasionally lets you have it both ways. So far, there’s been no blowback to the fact China seems to think a new air connection to South America via Auckland is part of Xi’s belt and road initiative (BRI) and Luxon very much doesn’t. Neither side seems to care very much what the other calls it.
But, as Luxon will no doubt hear at Nato, the nature of a polarising world means the days of New Zealand having a dollar each way may be numbered.
So, we have “ups and downs” within the course of a week and within a single day. With things changing so much, so fast, how is any country to think in centuries when the story changes by the hour?
Nothing’s certain about this relationship in the years to come – nothing apart from the fact that in 100 years, China will still remember exactly who visited them this week, pictures and all.
Luxon has now headed onward to Europe.