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China has only become integrated into the global economy over the past 20 years, the results for China, stunning, hundreds of millions of people lifted out of extreme poverty.  This lifts living standards worldwide, has kept global inflation down, and stretched families’ purchasing power.  In part, this is why the last 10 years has seen the most sustained economic growth in history.  

There are some who oppose NZ’s trade deal with China, and want a boycott of the Olympics.  It’s precisely because China depends on the global trading system that world opinion on human rights now matters to the Chinese.  Thirty million people perished during the cultural revolution and Mao’s great leap backwards.  World opinion didn’t matter to the Chinese then, now it does, and that’s a good thing.

China is going through the same process as Japan, Singapore, and places like Taiwan.  As living standards rise, a middle-class emerges that seeks out better social outcomes.  Wages in the Pearl delta rose 13% last year.  Seven thousand factories will close this year because wages have moved up and these jobs will head inland, to Vietnam, even Africa.  This is the virtue of free markets and globalisation.  For the first time the Chinese Government is answerable to its own laws, you can now sue the Government!  It’s no longer an atheist state, there is the beginnings of freedom of religion, over 10,000 Chinese Muslims were allowed to go to the Haj in Mecca.  Christians sued the Shanghai Government for wrongful arrest when they express their religious beliefs.  This is imperfect and uneven progress that should be celebrated.  All this is healthy and Prime Minister Helen Clark has hit the right note.

An Olympic boycott would be futile and counter-productive.  Why should sportspeople carry the absolute burden of foreign policy?  Why not stop the thousands of Chinese students, who pay to come to NZ to study, making education our 5^th biggest export income earner?  Because it would be stupid.  Is this in contradiction of a sporting boycott of apartheid South Africa?  No.  To the shame of NZ, the South Africans once imposed their racial selection policies on NZ.  And NZ, for a long time, accepted their dictates.  The first leaflets I delivered were ‘No Maoris, No Tour’.  Amazingly, a National Party Deputy Prime Minister, when in South Africa, tried to cool the situation suggesting that an All Black team should have Maoris, but ‘not too many, and not too black’.*

 “The principles of politics shouldn’t interfere with sport, saw Muldoon specifically invite a racially selected team from South Africa to coincide with an election in 1981, and then opposed sending a NZ team to the Moscow Olympics.  Wrong on both counts.  For the first time, I recently refused to sign up to a statement by the ‘Shared Concern Initiative’, suggesting the consideration of an Olympic boycott.  This global group of  ‘worthies’, of which I’m the least distinguished member, is lead by my hero, the noble past President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, a poet and politician, who was imprisoned by the Communists.  The Dali Lama has not suggested a boycott, Nelson Mandela did.

The NZ/China trade deal is to be welcomed.  Would our competitors turn it down?  In fact, our advantage will last only a few years, if that, as others sign up.

All this exposes something else about NZ’s political process.  Our Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, says he’s not a member of Government except when overseas and may not vote for it.  How is this possible?  Peter Dunne has said he will vote for the deal but has the Chinese shaking in their boots by saying he won’t go to the reception.  The Maori Party has taken different positions, but one MP said we shouldn’t trade with countries that pay lower wages than NZ.  That means we can’t trade with Samoa, forcing them to pay more for goods from anywhere else.

At last the adults in the Labour and National Parties have taken control for a short time and done what is right for NZ.  This deal is worth a few hundred million dollars to NZ, small compared to the Uruguay Trade round, and tiny compared to what NZ will get from the Doha Trade round.  Why is it so small?  Because the terms of China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation collapsed tariffs in agriculture by 90%.  Isn’t it a good thing that China is now inside the WTO and answerable to its rules, obligations, and binding legal disputes system.  The WTO and the Doha Round is still the biggest global game.  But NZ can do a deal with China and advance the WTO.  It’s a melancholy fact the best thing I ever did was leave NZ to run the WTO.  China joined the WTO and the Doha Trade round was launched in my time.  But modesty prevents me from pointing this out.

* Source book ’Kiwi Keith’ by Barry Gustafson

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