(See today’s China Daily report titled New Zealand PM calls for deepening economic, environmental cooperation with China.) And that poses challenges for small countries like New Zealand that are reliant on the stability and predictability of international rules for our prosperity and security. Our region is becoming more contested, less predictable, and less secure. New Zealand is willing and ready to maintain communication with China on helping island countries develop.īut at Auckland on Monday, he added caveats:Ĭhina’s rise and how it seeks to exert that influence is also a major driver of the increasing strategic competition, particularly in our wider home region, the Indo-Pacific.
He said that New Zealand values its relations with China… (and) believes that bilateral relations should not be defined by differences, and it is important that the two sides have candid communication, mutual respect, and harmony without uniformity.
The Chinese readout of President Xi’s meeting with Hipkins in Beijing on June 27 attributed the following remarks to the latter: New Zealand PMs have begun attending the NATO summits since last year as one of “IP4,” the alliance’s four Indo-Pacific partners (joining Australia, Japan and South Korea.) Meanwhile, Hipkins had just returned from the NATO Summit in Vilnius last week. Hipkins’ speech came just three weeks after his return from Beijing on an official visit with a business delegation when he met with China’s President Xi Jinping. New Zealand’s estimation matters because it is a small country in Southern Pacific heavily dependent on trade with China for preserving its prosperity and yet one of the Five Eyes (along with the U.S., UK, Australia and Canada), the exclusive secretive security grouping of Anglo-Saxon countries. On Monday, while delivering the keynote address at the annual China Business Summit held in Auckland, New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins weighed in on the power dynamic in the Indo-Pacific.
0 kommentar(er)
