New Zealand PM to Meet CCP Leader Xi Jinping Amid Recession

Minister Chris Hipkins looks on during Labour Party Congress at Te Papa in Wellington, New Zealand, on May 27, 2023. Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins will lead a delegation of 29 people to China next week to meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping and other high-ranking Chinese officials.

“Since becoming Prime Minister, I’ve prioritised working in partnership with business to boost export growth in order to grow our economy,” Hipkins said.

“China represents nearly a quarter of all our exports, was our second largest source of tourists pre-COVID and is a significant source of international students, so it’s a critical part of our economic recovery.”

This marks the first visit to China by a New Zealand prime minister since former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, who visited Beijing just before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and former New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern shake hands before the meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, China, on April 1, 2019. Kenzaburo Fukuhara/Pool/Getty Images

Hipkins will visit Beijing, Tianjin, and Shanghai between June 25 to 30 and take part in a range of events, including giving a keynote address at Peking University and launching a tourism partnership in Shanghai.

“East China is an important hub for New Zealand businesses. I am looking forward to connecting with their China teams and partners in Shanghai and to showcasing our innovative, world-class products and services in one of the world’s largest consumer markets,” he said.

The business delegation will include representatives from New Zealand’s tourism and education sector as part of the Labour government’s efforts to breathe some life back into the economy.

It comes after Stats NZ recently revealed that New Zealand had slipped into a technical recession, which is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth.

Figures show that the economy fell 0.1 percent in the March quarter after a 0.7 percent fall in the previous December quarter.

A downfall in activity in business services was the biggest downward driver, particularly management consulting and advertising services.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson downplayed the news, saying that it was “not a surprise.”

“Today’s outcome fits the definition of a technical recession by the barest of margins. But the resilience of the New Zealand economy, including historically low unemployment, means it will not have the impact that would normally be associated with this term,” he said on June 15.

Remaining Tied to China

When first announcing his visit, Hipkins noted that in 2022, exports to China were valued at $21 billion (US$13 billion), or one-quarter of exports.

But he denied that New Zealand was putting its eggs all in one basket in the light of warnings to diversify trade partners.

“Of course, China is an existing trading partner and a valuable one to New Zealand,” he said during a post-cabinet press conference on June 12.

“But the work that we have been doing around the EU free-trade agreement, the UK free-trade agreement, and our other trade discussions in a range of different contexts—including, significantly, the CPTPP—are a part of our really concerted effort to diversify our overall export market shares.

When addressing New Zealand’s balancing act with Beijing, Hipkins said New Zealand has always prided itself on having a stable and consistent position.

“That means that where we have human rights concerns, we will raise them; where we have concerns around trade or any other foreign-policy issue, we will raise those,” he said.

“So our relationship with China has always been based on setting out clearly our position and, you know, being consistent in our position, and we’ll continue to do that.”

On June 9, New Zealand also banded together with the United States, the UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan to condemn economic coercive practices.

“We have a robust, ongoing dialogue with China, and we’ve always been very clear in our opposition to economic coercion. We believe in a rules-based system. That is what New Zealand has consistently spoken in favour of, and we’ll continue to do that,” Hipkins said.

“Any country that seeks to use economic coercion is the target of that statement.”

New Zealand has watched its closest neighbour, Australia, be the ongoing target of economic coercion by the Chinese regime.

Blinken Visits China Amid Tensions

Hipkins’s visit follows U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s meeting with Xi on June 19 amid strained relations between the U.S. and China and was the highest-ranking official visit to China within the Biden administration to date.

Speaking to the press, he said that the relationship was clearly at a point of instability.

“We’re not going to have success on every issue between us on any given day, but in a whole variety of areas, on the terms that we set for this trip, we have made progress, and we are moving forward,” Blinken said.

He also reiterated that the United States continues to advocate its “One China” policy, but raised concerns about Beijing’s recent provocative actions.

“The reason that this is a concern for so many countries, not just the United States, is that were there to be a crisis over Taiwan, the likelihood is that that would produce an economic crisis that could affect quite literally the entire world,” he said.

The U.S. decision to establish diplomatic ties with Beijing over Taipei was based on the expectation that the future of the self-governing island will be determined through peaceful means, Blinken said.

But China expert Feng Chongyi, an associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney, warned that engagement with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was like “dancing with fires.”

“[The CCP] still wants to continue to parasitize the capital market. It’s like this virus that cannot survive without its host or capital,” Feng told The Epoch Times.