Well, if it ever comes to a hot war with China, the generals in Beijing can at least rest assured they’ve got plenty of staging areas in the Pacific. Not just the knockoff “islands” they’ve been manufacturing in the South China Sea, or even the Cargo Cultists of the mendicant Pacific islands.
No, China has set its sights on the biggest airstrip in the South Pacific — and its leaders are quietly selling out their country and its allies in a greedy grab for some communist cash.
In November 2021, the New Zealand China Council published a report entitled The Southern Link: Developing a Global Value Chain, which outlined the concept of a ‘Southern Link’ as ‘an extension of a global value chain (GVC) that involves the routing of multi-modal freight and passengers between ASEAN–North Asia and South America via New Zealand’. The plan intends that New Zealand will serve as an air and sea freight hub between East Asia and South America, facilitating e-commerce trade, tourism, and education and mediation services, and thereby providing an economic boost to post-pandemic New Zealand.
The associated media release states that ‘transiting via New Zealand offers the shortest air route between many major cities on the two continents.
Wait, that all sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it?
The report has some history. On 25 June 2019, prior to the COVID pandemic, an initial conference, ‘Building the Southern Link’, was held in Auckland, New Zealand. Co-hosted by the New Zealand China Council, the Latin America NZ Business Council, China’s Fudan University, the Chile Pacific Foundation and the Argentine Council for International Relations, the conference was promoted by the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Which sounds very much like just more of the web of front groups that Beijing uses to spy and peddle influence in gullible countries around the world. Especially New Zealand.
The Briefing Document for the conference linked the ‘Southern Link’ with China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and asserted that the ‘BRI provides an opportunity for New Zealand to continue to develop its international connections as a global trader in a globalised age’.
Yes: that BRI. The one China has used to ensnare dozens of developing countries in its web of debt-trap diplomacy. In scooping up a foolish socialist-led government like Jacinda Ardern’s, China is winning one of its biggest prizes so far in its Cold War with the West.
Unlike Australia, New Zealand has signed a Belt and Road Memorandum of Arrangement with China and remains the only Five Eyes country to have done so […]
[Critics] have opined that the country is already excessively dependent on Chinese investment, potentially giving rise to unhealthy PRC political and economic influence. Indeed, the enthusiasm for engagement with China by successive New Zealand governments—both the earlier National and the current Labour Government—has led to intimations by intelligence officials from Five Eyes partners that New Zealand’s access to Five Eyes intelligence might be at risk. This has been rejected by Andrew Little, the New Zealand minister responsible for the nation’s spy agencies.
Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?
China has certainly been investing heavily in Latin America—in ports, railways, power projects, highways and refineries, as well as other infrastructure, including cyber facilities and a space tracking station […] The PRC is now seeking to expand air links across the Pacific.
It’s all benign fluff about trade and tourism — for now.
Interestingly, Chinese language sources from official mouthpieces assert that the initiative came from the New Zealand government. Which is quite likely true — having rooted the country’s economy with their disastrous pandemic policies, Labour is desperate for money. And they’re being played like a fiddle.
In fact, this idea was also in China’s plans, but it was better to have it put forward under New Zealand’s name, because New Zealand is a western ally, and it is thus difficult for the Americans to oppose it. This is a form that we now advocate: That is, we transform the BRI into what is nominally a plan by other countries, but which is actually an element of the BRI.
Parliament of Australia
China is playing Ardern for a fool. Not without reason.
