Could New Zealand serve as an ‘honest broker’ to repair ties between China and the West?

Fresh off its upgraded Beijing trade deal, Wellington looks uniquely positioned to help defuse tensions between China and nations such as the US and Australia

Experts say New Zealand has the credentials to be a fair intermediary, but others point to ‘cold-war thinking’ getting in the way

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Some experts argue that New Zealand could use its friendly relations with Beijing to improve ties between China and the other four other Western members of the Five Eyes alliance. Illustration: Henry Wong

Published: 4:30am, 2 Feb 2021Updated: 11:05am, 4 Mar 2021

Amid the fallout from protracted trade wars and political conflicts between China, the United States and its allies, there stands a bright outlier.

Last week, the small nation of New Zealand managed to cut a fresh trade deal with China, expanding the breadth of its more than decade-old free-trade agreement and reducing tariffs on nearly all of its exports to China to zero.

Some have even argued that New Zealand could use its friendly relations with Beijing to serve as a mediator to help ease tensions between China and the other four other members of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing coalition – the US, Australia, Canada and Britain. Others warn that such an effort would be fraught with difficulty, given the entrenched positions of all parties, and could easily backfire on Wellington.

As the only Five Eyes member largely free of conflict with China, New Zealand appears to be in a favourable position to act as an “honest broker”, said Tan See Seng, a professor of international relations in the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University.

Singapore itself has acted as a third-party facilitator to help defuse several tense political situations in the past, notably at the Wang-Koo summit between China and Taiwan in 1993 followed by the Xi-Ma meeting, again between China and Taiwan, in 2015. These meetings could serve as possible models for New Zealand if it were to become a middleman, though the conditions for Singapore were different than they are for New Zealand.

“The question [of New Zealand’s position as a broker] is very much in line with Wellington’s recent offer to be the middle person for nuclear disarmament, in view of [US President Joe] Biden’s purported interest to that end,” Tan noted.