Speaking to the seventh annual China Business Summit in Auckland, with the Chinese ambassador to NZ Wu Xi in the audience, Ardern delivered a clear message of expectation about China’s behaviour as an emerging, significant world power.
“As China’s role in the world grows and changes, the differences between our systems – and the interests and values that shape those systems – are becoming harder to reconcile,” Ardern said.
“This is a challenge that we, and many other countries across the Indo Pacific region, but also in Europe and other regions, are also grappling with.”
In an apparent nod to China’s trade retaliation against recent Australian criticisms of Beijing, Ardern said “the way that China treats its partners is important for us”.
The Prime Minister’s China Summit comes a fortnight after Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta gave the most comprehensive outline of the way the Government’s approach to China is shifting as the country’s largest trading partner becomes more authoritarian.
Both Ardern and Trade Minister Damien O’Connor trod a careful line, welcoming the potential for travel between China and NZ reopening at some time over the next year, but also stressing the need not to become overly reliant on a single trading partner.
“As minister Mahuta observed in her speech to the NZ China Council, different perspectives can underpin cultural exchange and learning,” Ardern said.
“But some differences challenge NZ’s interests and values.”
Accordingly, she added a caveat to the way the relationship would develop, saying “managing the relationship is not always going to be easy and there can be no guarantees”.
“Given our two countries’ different histories, worldviews and political and legal systems, NZ and China are going to take different perspectives on some important issues,” she said.
“We will continue to work through these in a consistent manner, as we have always done.
“But as minister Mahuta said last month, we need to acknowledge that there are some things on which China and NZ do not, cannot, and will not agree – this need not derail our relationship, it is simply a reality.”
The Prime Minister did not specifically mention the use of the Five Eyes global intelligence network as a platform for sending joint messages to China but stressed that a variety of forums were available and would be used.
She reiterated “grave concerns” about human rights abuses in Xinjiang and “continued negative developments with regard to the rights, freedoms and autonomy of the people of Hong Kong”.
That drew a formal rebuke from ambassador Wu, who used her speech to say these were internal Chinese matters that should not be interfered with “to maintain sound development of our bilateral relations”.
Wu says claims of forced labour and genocide in Xinjiang were “lies and rumours” spread by those seeking to stunt China’s progress.
She warned that politicising issues and attempting to “impose ideologies on others will only poison international cooperation and may push to confrontation”, which would “lead us nowhere”.
Ardern says NZ would continue to choose whether to speak privately or publicly on issues consistent with the country’s culture as an “an open, pluralistic, democracy, with a focus on transparency and the rule of law”.
“We have shown this quite clearly over the past year by deliberately choosing when we make public statements on issues of concern, and with whom,” Ardern said.
She says areas of difference “need not define a relationship”.
“But equally, they are part and parcel of NZ staying true to who we are as a nation,” she said.
“We hope that China too sees it in its own core interests to act in the world in ways that are consistent with its responsibilities as a growing power, including as a permanent member of the UN Security Council.”
Former prime minister John Key says issues such as Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet and the future of Taiwan were “not new”, would exist in the future and that NZ had for many years agreed to a ‘one China’ policy.
He says tens of thousands of NZ jobs and thousands of NZ businesses depended on the China trading relationship.
“I would not throw that away because some people around the world are taking a slightly different perspective,” Key said.
Helen Clark, the Labour prime minister who initiated the China free trade agreement, told the summit the claim that NZ was abandoning old allies for the sake of the China trade was a “slur that should be renounced”.
She strongly criticised the way the Five Eyes alliance had gone from being a secret, intelligence-gathering arrangement when she was prime minister to a diplomatic tool.
“It is a huge leap to go from that (secrecy) to coordination of policy across the Five Eyes,” she said, and it represented a threat to NZ’s sovereignty and independence.
Likening the deteriorating relationship between the US and China to being “not unlike a new Cold War”, Clark says that was unlikely to improve much under the new US president Joe Biden, and urged NZ to stay out of the “jousting and jostling”.
NZ’s traditional allies were “very important” and the relationship with China was “huge, strategic and very valuable, in which we must keep space to voice areas of difference.”
