IRONICALLY, THE CONCERN over Chinese influence in New Zealand is being raised against a backdrop of unchallenged American hegemony. Extending across the whole width of the nation’s political stage, this American backdrop has become so much a part of the play’s scenery that most Kiwis no longer notice it. The inclusion of a few Chinese props, however, is enough to induce something close to panic among New Zealand’s political class.
That this country remains enmeshed in the intelligence gathering networks of the United States National Security Agency, for example, is considered problematic by only a very small minority of New Zealanders. Between the Battle of the Coral Sea in 1942 and the passage of New Zealand’s anti-nuclear legislation in 1985, most Kiwis simply assumed that the United States would always be their country’s principal military protector. America’s strategic planners seemed to agree, because they never for a moment considered suspending New Zealand from the so-called “Five Eyes” intelligence-gathering alliance. Dropping us out of the ANZUS Pact was considered punishment enough.
Moreover, as Nicky Hager’s book “Other People’s Wars” make clear, from the moment New Zealand was suspended from the ANZUS Pact, elements of what passes for this country’s “deep state” undertook to rebuild this country’s damaged relationship with the United States. Senior civil servants like Gerald Hensley simply refused to accept the Fourth Labour Government’s foreign and defence policies.
With the Wellington Declaration of 2010, and the Washington Declaration of 2012, the rift between the United States and New Zealand became a thing of the past. It had taken Hensley and his successors 25 years, but the anti-nuclear rebel was finally back in what Prime Minister John Key called “The Club”.
For those of you wondering what the Wellington Declaration (signed by Hillary Clinton and Murray McCully) entails – here’s the guts of it:
“The United States-New Zealand strategic partnership is to have two fundamental elements: a new focus on practical cooperation in the Pacific region; and enhanced political and subject-matter dialogue — including regular Foreign Ministers’ meetings and political-military discussions.”
The content of the Labour-NZF Coalition government’s Defence White Paper, far from being a departure from existing policy, is clearly a reaffirmation of the previous National-led government’s re-commitment to the United States.
These diplomatic and military links are merely the most formal manifestations of US hegemony in New Zealand. Beyond and beneath them extends an intricate network of personal, cultural and economic relationships that binds together inextricably the American and New Zealand political classes.
So many Kiwis have studied and worked in the United States. So many exchange students have come and gone. So many of our military and police officers have been seconded to serve alongside their American counterparts. So many of our best and brightest graduates have been shoulder-tapped for a stint in Washington or New York.
So numerous are these relationships that they could be said to constitute a veritable “fifth column” of American power in New Zealand society. Even if Kiwis elected a government committed to breaking free from the tutelage of the USA, the resistance from these US “assets” in our foreign affairs, military, business and media bureaucracies would be formidable.
Also to be considered is the all-pervasive influence of American “soft power” on New Zealand society. So much of the digital information we receive, the movies and television shows we watch, the music we listen to, the clothes we wear and the vocabulary we use in our everyday speech hails from the United States. Our directors and screenwriters head for Los Angeles and New York. Young Maori and Pasifika from South Auckland emulate the musical and dance styles of Black and Hispanic Americans. Even our news and current-affairs shows formats are borrowed from the US. How much of New Zealand culture is genuinely indigenous? Three-quarters? Half? A quarter? Less? Living in the shadow of a great power can be a profoundly disintegrative experience.
We have been here before, of course. Back in the days of “Mother England” when New Zealand made a fetish of being the most loyal of the British Empire’s “dominions across the sea”. British hegemony in the century between the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi and the Battle of the Coral Sea was no less all-encompassing than the hegemonic networks of the United States.
There was, however, one important difference between British and American rule. Up until 1973, the United Kingdom was happy to assign New Zealand the highly remunerative role of the Mother Country’s South Seas farm. The Americans, however, have never expressed the slightest interest in taking all the agricultural produce New Zealanders would be only too delighted to send them – quite the reverse, in fact. American farmers have worked tirelessly to keep the highly-efficient Kiwis primary exports out of their markets.
Which brings us to China: the one country which has been willing to open her markets to New Zealand’s agricultural exports on a truly massive scale. The country which, more than any other, kept New Zealand afloat during the Global Financial Crisis. The country which, in return for keeping our economy afloat, asks of us only two things: equal access to our markets; and tangible evidence of our respect.
To secure this reciprocation, China is doing no more than any other powerful state will do to achieve its national objectives. It is building relationships with its trading partner’s political and economic elites; and, it is projecting its soft power as far as possible into their society. In other words, behaving exactly as the British and Americans have behaved in relation to New Zealanders – albeit on a much, much smaller scale.
If New Zealand’s American “friends” are so anxious to have us remove the handful of Chinese props from our political stage, then perhaps it is time for us to replace their all-American backdrop with something Kiwi-made.
Big difference with China vs America. Chinese interests are all to willing to do business at a certain price. American interests some times don’t even know what the price is.
EPA fans struggling coal industry by rolling back pollution regulations
Acting administrator says easing of Obama-era rules, which pushes back deadline to close ash dumps, saves $30m annually
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/18/epa-coal-ash-obama-regulations-rolled-back
There was historically a perception that communist China, a closed and repressive dictatorship , was a threat . Whereas US and UK were decent democracies , and safer to be friends with. We see the democratic structure of the US as coming under increasing question as their elected president is disparaged and vilified for trying to do in foreign relations what he was elected to do. Namely improve relations with Moscow. The people who really rule in the US are having to come out, and reveal how little power the elected president really has, and how much power the spy agencies do have. That doesn’t make China a democracy, but the difference in power structure is revealed as being largely one of method and perception, and more dependant on the individuals incumbent than the structure. At least in China you know who is making the decisions.
We should have our independence. The world would respect us for it.
D J S
%1000 D J S.
Well spoken(?) David, too true.
Well if you had to choose the side of peace who would you go with.
USA has been at war 93% of the time since its violent birth in 1776.https://www.globalresearch.ca/america-has-been-at-war-93-of-the-time-222-out-of-239-years-since-1776/5565946
USA has been involved in 37 wars since 1945 and many more instances of assination of heads of state, suppression of nationalist movements, bombings and regime change. http://davidswanson.org/warlist/
While Britian has only been involved 28 wars since 1945.https://www.historyguy.com/british_wars_1945present.htm
Communist China on the other hand invaded Tibet and supported its neighbours nationalist governments in Korea and Viet Nam.
Yes Joe The perception may well have been false as we seem to learn more about the background of those wars than seemed to be apparent at the time (s). At least in my case. It always seemed like they were righteous wars fought for human rights and justice. It doesn’t seem that ha sheen that way looking back.
D J S
This requires a much larger readership!
The pervasive assault on NZ culture via all the routes you mention is so successful the larger NZ public doesn’t see it.
This is the best essay on the subject I’ve read for a good long while.So heartening to see it outlined so well.
Wish you still had a weekly column in the Press.
Love ya to bits!
We love you also FRANCESA,
We have been ‘colonialised’ since the first Maori landing party firstly arrived and took over from the small Island people of the Moriori.
This past set of experiences has been both a ‘good and sometimes bad experience’.
But we do need our Government to take control of our futures to ensure that the current ‘mix’ of peoples do not get out of control, to cause division and financial ruin to others.
Living in unity needs constant ‘caring and nurturing’ and the NZ Government needs to work for all of us to ensure this.
Good article Chris and very good feedback from everyone here also.
A welll supported article and a ‘must read.’
America is run by banks, corporations and opportunists, for the short-term benefit of banks, corporations and opportunists. The shift away from democratic processes commenced in the 19th century, and was complete by the mid 20th century, by which time the Federal Reserve, a privately-owned bank, was well established as the nation’s money-printer, and by which time the military-industrial complex was deciding what transport systems would be used, how food would be grown, what would be allowed on television or in ‘newspapers’, which country needed ‘regime change’ to facilitate American cultural, financial and economic invasion etc. Now democracy is in America is entirely phony (you cannot be elected high office without truckloads of money or massive corporate sponsorship).
Since the overturning of legislation by the Clinton administration in the late 1990s the power of corporations and banks has grown immensely, as has the gap between the rich and poor. And since corporations and banks operate on a loot-and-pollute basis, with a focus on short-term profits, the infrastructure of America is collapsing, as its environment. Soon the industrial system of food production will begin to collapse, due to the extremely high energy requirements, the high chemical requirements, the denaturing of the soil and the extreme weather conditions associated with planetary overheating.
Since WW2, China has morphed from a largely peasant society with a small and relatively primitive industrial base into a technologically advanced nation…. as demonstrated by the huge number of skyscrapers, factories, motorways and rail systems constructed every year: in one year China manufactures and uses more concrete than the US did in its entire history. And now it has the financial surpluses that allow rapid military expansion.
By adopting the western model of development, China has set itself up for environmental and economic collapse, of course, since China has little in the way of energy resources and has a monstrous appetite for energy that can only be serviced in the short term by importation of fossil fuels from places like Iran and Russia. By burning humungous amounts of fossil fuels every day, China is starting to rival the US as the world’s greatest polluter. And China is just as vulnerable as any other nation, and more vulnerable than many, to the effects of planetary overheating. China will obviously ‘make hay while the sun shines’ in order to be able to defend itself from American hegemony, and in doing so exacerbate its long-term predicaments.
The ‘shall we go with America or go with China’ argument is therefore fatuous, since neither has adopted sustainable models with respect to anything, and NZ is similarly on its was ‘down the drain’ as a consequence of overdependence on fossil fuels, overconsumption and desecration of the land and waters that are requirements for participation in global commercial activity.
All the evidence points to global collapse occurring over the period 2020 to 2030, with the extraordinarily high temperatures, the raging fires and the unprecedented rainfall events that have been occurring throughout the Northern Hemisphere in 2018 being harbingers of that collapse.
I say the Northern Hemisphere but in fact regions of our neighbour across the ditch are in dire straits, with the outlook for the coming months being for drier than normal across much of the nation.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/19/you-count-your-blessings-farm-families-battling-drought-photo-essay
Needless to say, in a confidence-based system in which loans and credit are regarded as paramount, we are required ‘the system’ to ignore all the evidence and pretend that everything is just fine and dandy, and that present political-economic arrangements have a future when it is abundantly clear they do not.
Needless to say, thanks to the corrupt corporate-owned media, the vast majority (99.9%?) of New Zealanders remain utterly clueless about all the factors that will determine their futures. Propaganda continues to flourish because it is so successful.
I dont really give a SHIT about notions of hegemony but I just wish the chinese wsould ceas and desist in their war against the natural world and the planetary environment. their harvesting of ivory and rhinoceros horn must stop
Which tells us that we’re doing it wrong.
A countries ‘economy’ cannot be dependent upon exports to another country because that will, inevitably, destroy the real economy as we run out of resources. And, yes, that includes farming as it needs all the resources that make up the soil to grow plants. When we export the plants/meat/dairy we’re exporting those irreplaceable resources.
The inevitable resort of being an export led economy is the destruction of the economy.
There cannot be equal access to our markets and they’ve done nothing to deserve our respect. On the former it means that we will be priced out of our own country (Tenants in our own land as John Key said) and on the latter they simply don’t meet our standards. Standards in working conditions, minimum wage, access to health, environmental protection and many others that would actually make free-trade a possibility.
Yes it is time that we did that and became in independent nation capable of supporting ourselves.
Certainly we and everyone else need to stop having stuff shipped here from all over the world that we could just as easily make here, and sending stuff all over the world that they can just as easily make or grow there. That applies to most international trade. It does not help the national economies except for a few individuals , and it isn’t environmentally sustainable.
How come all trading nations are in debt. Except Israel that is subsidised by the US? If there is a trade imbalance one country should be in credit by the same amount as a partner is in deficit. But they’r all in deficit. Not to each other ultimately , but to the banks. It’s madness.
D J S
Too true. For millennia trade was all about acquiring things that could not be found locally or made locally, and it was utter madness to transport stuff that could be acquired locally around the world…..which is why no one did it.
What changed all that was the introduction of steam-driven machinery into factories in Britain; they facilitated mass production, which in turn undercut traditional methods of manufacture and also made it profitable to transport raw materials, such as wool, halfway round the world.
In the modern world, international trade is dependent on massive disparities in wage rates and massive disparities in currency values. We would not be importing Chinese-made goods if wage rates in China were comparable to those in NZ, nor if the Chinese currency were no so grossly undervalued.
Often overlooked is the fact that all international trade is dependent on the burning of humungous quantities of oil (or derivatives of oil) in ships and planes every second of every day, and that international trade is a major contributor to the planetary overheating we have been witnessing.
It naturally follows that international trade has no long term future and in the not-too-distant-future people will be forced to acquire what they need (as opposed to what they want) locally. Sadly, as a consequence of all the development madness, stripping of resources, and fouling of the environment that has occurred in recent decades, in most locations the local environment will not support the population’s needs.
Needless to say, as agents of international banks and corporations, governments (and politicians in general) promote international trade, international tourism, overconsumption, and all the other aspects of modern living that have no long-term future and which are contributing inordinately to planetary meltdown.
Sadly, they (politicians) will keep making matters worse until the system ‘implodes’. The idiotic TINA philosophy still reigns supreme, even though there are dozens of far better alternatives to the way society is currently organised.
When ‘the world’ was the Mediterranean, Europe, Africa, Middle East and a bit further, there was international trade.
Before steam. Before the Iron Age.
There is plenty and enough archaeological evidence to prove that.
Lapis lazuli from Afghanistan arriving in Egypt. Silk, spices, the vital metals for making bronze tools and weapons. Technology movement(and it was darned good technology, too).
There’s something about a very large and traversible land mass – Eurasia – that leads to that kind of trafficking.
Have you read about the Tamil Pot?
D J S
Exactly! Camel trains and sail boats etc. Materials or products that were not obtainable locally or could not be produced locally were traded (sometimes over long distances) at VERY SLOW rates. Even mineral oil from underground reserves that leaked to the surface was traded -a few hundred tonnes a year (versus the current 5+ million tonnes a day).
Not to be forgotten is the fact that acquiring spices from the ‘East Indies’ without going through intermediaries was the initial driver for European exploration and colonisation.
How different the world is now; all kinds of manufactured goods that were made locally just a couple of decades ago are now almost exclusively Asian-made and transported here; we sell wine overseas to obtain funds to purchase overseas-made wine. Traders and shipping companies and opportunists love that kind of insanity….and the ultimate price of that kind of insanity is planetary meltdown due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 (going up every year at a rate unprecedented in geological history).
Meanwhile while the reserves of fossil fuels (which facilitate the functioning of the system) go rapidly down.
It is difficult to imagine a more destructive and more unsustainable set of living arrangements those that now dominate the world…and that is why they will inevitably go kaput.
We don’t know exactly when kaput will occur -maybe this year, maybe 3 years from now – but we do know that which is unsustainable cannot be sustained.
We do know that the longer current arrangement continue the worse the mayhem will be when they do fail.
The antonym of trade is war. Large countries like the US and China can get away with war because they don’t need to rely on trade. Many small countries that have to trade with each other reduce the incidence of war.
The Americans have been using the Mossad as an arm-length weapon in NZ to disrupt and interfere in New Zealand politics for years, and have been sending in their own agents to disrupt democratic protest since the days of the waterfront strike up until Occupy and beyond – and those actions have been largely supported by the NZ intelligence services despite the odd bloody nosed disagreement.
I don’t know why anyone is surprised that the Chinese are now doing the same thing.
Here’s just one practical example of the soft power Chris is talking about. I know a few people who have studied International Relations at Victoria University. This school trains most of the people who end up working at MFAT. Many of the lecturers are USAmericans, and they only seem to teach the “realist” school popular with neo-cons like Henry Kissinger. The “realist” school of IR teaches that the world will become a better place if every state ruthlessly pursues its own narrow self-interest. It’s based on the same faulty interpretations of game theory that underly neo-classical economics and its “rational economic actors”. Having MFAT staff trained exclusively in “realist” IR is disturbing in the same way as having our Treasury staff trained only neo-classical (“leave it to The MarketTM”) economics. It leaves them woefully under-equipped to write effective policy in a complex and ever-changing world, and slaved to the two main pillars of the Washington Consensus.
Those who decry American influence in New Zealand are allowed to do it: unless, like under the last government, there’s some horse trading or mosquito swatting to get done.
Because that’s how it is done: NZ spies are sent to France to spy on French elections; American spies are embedded and otherwise sent to NZ as students and so forth to disrupt what would be illegal for the NZ spies to disrupt the extent their foreign partners do it (and get away with it).
To what extent China would engage in such horse trading is a scary thought, too. Perhaps they are less of a threat to New Zealand citizens ironically because the intelligence relationships are less embedded; because they will be pursing their own objectives, rather than the objectives of the NZ government and industry, which are covertly often violently destructive to the lives of New Zealanders who naively proceed to act on the basis that democracy and democratic change is something the New Zealand government values.
Maybe in 100 years someone might find it funny enough to note, perhaps in Chinese, that both the left and the right are at the same time acting against their own interests: the left, arguing for a defense theatre that is unable to protect their protests, and the right, arguing for an economic arrangement that is unlikely to keep capital in the hands of their descendants, or even country. Perhaps both need to start caring about the later a little more. But I don’t see that happening.
[Comment declined for publication. Potentially defamatory and actionable. – Scarletmod]
China has an enormous population and decades ago it encouraged population stabilisation via its one-child-per-couple policy.
In recent times someone somewhere (a committee?) decided the one-child policy had to be relinquished; too many boys and not enough girls (abortion/infanticide) and insufficient young people to support future economic growth and future growth in consumption.
The US would have a relatively stable population were it not for immigration -poor people trying to get a slice of the action. Although consumption is relatively stable per capita, it is enormous by world standards.
India and host of other highly significant nations have both increasing populations and increasing appetites.
Unsurprisingly, the consumption of the Earth’s resources continues to increase and the ‘day we nominally go into overshoot’ inexorably advances.
‘Earth’s resources consumed in ever greater destructive volumes
Study says the date by which we consume a year’s worth of resources is arriving faster’
‘….The overshoot began in the 1970s, when rising populations and increasing average demands pushed consumption beyond a sustainable level. Since then, the day at which humanity has busted its annual planetary budget has moved forward…’
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/23/earths-resources-consumed-in-ever-greater-destructive-volumes
(me again) Although it is blatantly obvious, I will write it anyway; international trade is what keeps the world in state of overshoot, and international trade is a major reason for the ‘ever greater destructive volumes’.
Does anyone really think that a global economic system that is based on ever greater destruction [of the Earth and its natural environments] has anything other than a very short-term future?
People who work for money aren’t rare. People who work because of ideological conviction are. Any one experienced in managing there own properties will know that one good developer can be more productive than 10 or even 100 average developers. And when it comes to immigration and population controls, I dare say it’s more like 2000x’s.
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