There is understandable concern that the recent food contamination scandals in China, starting with the Fonterra melamine dairy product crisis in 2008 and book-ended by the fresh concerns over botulism this August, could have a corrosive effect on the trading relationship between China and New Zealand.
The relationship matters a great deal to New Zealand. China is now by some margin the country’s second largest trading partner, having rapidly overtaken the United States and long outdistanced Europe. And we are only at the beginning of what will in time become New Zealand’s most important economic relationship.
New Zealand is right to be concerned. China has for long taken a tough line with countries deemed to have offended it.
A classic example is Norway. Norway and China were on the verge of signing a bilateral trade agreement in 2010 when the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the imprisoned dissident writer Liu Xiabo. In response, China broke off trade negotiations and they have been in cold storage ever since, with signs of a thaw becoming evident only this year.
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How a China divided between nationalists, communists and warlords made its stand against imperial Japan
China’s War with Japan, 1937-1945: The Struggle for Survival, by Rana Mitter, Allen Lane, RRP£25, 480 pages
The British think of the second world war as starting in 1939, when Germany invaded Poland; in America it begins with the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941; for Russians the war also commences in 1941, with the launch of Operation Barbarossa. For China it started much earlier, in 1931 with the Japanese occupation and subsequent annexation of Manchuria, followed in 1937 by an invasion that led to the conquest of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and many other cities. Yet in the west the Sino-Japanese war has received scant attention and has at most been viewed as a sideshow to the primary theatre of war in Europe.
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Some Western observers have speculated that with the economic rise of China, the rest of the world might consider Chinese governance as an alternative system to Western democracy. But, says author Martin Jacques, you won’t hear China offering itself as a model anytime soon. It’s a policy choice not to be seen as one.
In the West, the Chinese model of governance is not seen as an alternative to the Western liberal political order.
But as China overtakes the United States to become the largest economy and pulls well ahead over the next two decades, some forecasts predict that it will be twice the size of the U.S. economy by 2030.
Then growing attention will be paid to the Chinese system of governance.
The strengths of Chinese governance are threefold — its ability to think strategically, its infrastructural prowess and the impressive competence of its government.
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In his first meeting with the new president, Xi Jinping, it is vital that the two powers rebuild their relationship
On Friday the new Chinese president, Xi Jinping, and the United States president, Barack Obama, will meet for two days of talks at Sunnylands, a private estate near Los Angeles. It will be their first meeting since Xi assumed the presidency. The future fortunes of the world are bound up with the two countries finding a new kind of modus vivendi. It will not be easy.
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Eric was a deeply political person. He was shaped, above all, by, in his own words, ‘the two most decisive years of my life,’ those in Berlin between 1931 and 1933, during which, as a young teenager, he witnessed the rise of Hitler and the parallel rise of the KPD. In 1932 he joined the SSB, a young communist organisation. ‘As I entered the school year 1932-3’, he wrote, ‘the sense that we were living in some kind of final crisis, or at least a crisis destined for some cataclysmic resolution, became overpowering.’
His experiences in central Europe gave Eric his near-lifelong commitment to communism. He grew up in a period of volcanic change, he lived with a foreboding of catastrophe. His political co-ordinates were profoundly different from what they would have been had he spent these years in Britain. At the same time, growing up in central Europe before moving to Britain at the age of 15, imbued him with a highly cosmopolitan outlook, including a facility with so many languages, that, certainly in a British context, was most unusual and was to shape his subsequent political and intellectual development.
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There’s a widespread view in the West that China’s great weakness is its system of governance. Above all, the absence of a Western-style democracy is seen as depriving government of legitimacy. It’s certainly true that China lacks a Western-style democracy, but does that mean its government is shorn of legitimacy? According to Pew polls and other similar evidence, the Chinese government enjoys satisfaction ratings that are rather superior to those of their Western counterparts.
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The following essay appeared in an edited, cut-down form on the China Daily website.
The challenges that China faces over the next decade are a product of changes in the country’s external environment together with the consequences of China’s home-grown transformation.
The external context has shifted in two profound respects. A decade ago, the Western economies still seemed in relatively robust health and were growing at a reasonable rate. Since 2008, that picture has changed dramatically. The Western economies are mired in a deep structural crisis which shows no sign of being resolved. This is the worst crisis of Western capitalism since the 1930s and it seems likely that the crisis has not yet even reached its halfway point. In other words, the Great Recession will last at least until the 19th Communist Party Congress, and perhaps even, in the case of Europe in particular, the 20th Congress in 2022.
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This is the script of the Point of View talk first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on October 26th, 2012, also available on the BBC News Magazine. Missed the programme? Download it as a podcast or listen again on BBC iPlayer.
China and the United States are about to choose new leaders via very different methods. But is a candidate voted for by millions a more legitimate choice than one annointed by a select few, asks Martin Jacques.
This week will witness an extraordinary juxtaposition of events. On Tuesday the next American president will be elected. Two days later, the 18th congress of the Chinese Communist Party will select the new Chinese president and prime minister.
The contrast could hardly be greater.
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This is the script of the Point of View talk first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on October 26th, 2012, also available on the BBC News Magazine. Missed the programme? Download it as a podcast or listen again on BBC iPlayer
I was on a taxi journey in Shanghai with a very intelligent young Chinese student, who was helping me with interviews and interpreting. She was shortly to study for her doctorate at a top American university. She casually mentioned that some Chinese students who went to the US ended up marrying Americans.
I told her that I had recently seen such a mixed couple in Hong Kong, a Chinese woman with a black American. This was clearly not what she had in mind. Her reaction was a look of revulsion. I was shocked. Why did she react that way to someone black, but not someone white? This was over a decade ago, but I doubt much has changed. What does her response tell us – if anything – about Chinese attitudes towards ethnicity?
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This is the script of the Point of View talk first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on October 19th, 2012, also available on the BBC News Magazine. Missed the programme? Download it as a podcast or listen again on BBC iPlayer.
China is on course to becoming a superpower – but not in the way many expect, writes economist Martin Jacques.
Beijing these days is positively throbbing with debate. It may not have the trappings of a western-style democracy, but it is now home to the most important and interesting discussions in the world.
When I addressed an audience of young Chinese diplomats at their foreign ministry a year ago, it was abundantly clear that a fascinating debate is under way about what kind of foreign policy might be appropriate for the global power China is in the process of becoming.
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