China, New Zealand, and the Complexities of Globalization Asymmetry, Complementarity, and Competition Tim Beal and Kang Yuanfei Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016
Chapter 2: The Historical Legacy –Themes and Issues
Tim Beal
China has always been visible on the economic landscape of modern New Zealand, sometime quite prominently and at other times scarcely noticeable. Even when trade between the two countries was very small, suppressed by war or the post-1949 embargo, the potential was always there even if only recognized by a few visionaries such as Rewi Alley or Vic Percival.
Moreover, the movement of people – Chinese gold diggers to New Zealand and later New
Zealanders, often missionaries, to China – meant that there was always some awareness of
China in New Zealand. On top of this, New Zealand as a product and part of Western expansion and imperialism, could scarcely be unaffected by the wider issues surrounding
China.
Two major interlocked themes become apparent as the historical narrative unfolds. Firstly, there has always been a tension between the Janus-like perception of China as Golden Fleece and as Yellow Peril, and this continues today. Secondly, partly a reflection of this, but with imperatives of its own, is the interplay between politics and economics. Politics may be on the grand scale, imperial policy emanating from London or Washington, or national; driven by concerns in Wellington or Beijing. On the other hand they may be very local – alarm about house prices in Auckland being perceived to being driven up by Chinese immigration – but politics provides a constant counterpoint to economic forces.1 ‘Economic’ may be considered to have many facets, from the technological – production, transportation, storage, communication, etc. – through to the social, such as changing tastes and demands.
Modern New Zealand is usually dated from European settlement but, in fact, trade with China actually preceded any substantial settlement. New Zealand’s trade with China dates back to
1792 with a consignment of sealskins. Elder and Green note that 'the forerunner of a trade that established sealskins as New Zealand’s first export commodity, and China as its premier market'.2 The Qing elite had an insatiable demand for fur, and exports of pelts had been
Russia’s major export to China and a key driver of Russia’s expansion across Eurasia. The
Americans were particularly active in this trade, hunting seals from the South Atlantic to the
South Pacific and then selling the skins in Guangzhou where they fetched ten times the price obtaining in New York. 3New Zealand’s participation in this lucrative market soon depleted the seal population and although ‘sustainability’ is a current buzzword, in the 18th century little thought was given to that, nor of course was there any mechanism to ensure that harvesting was kept to a replaceable level. This was to be a mistake to be repeated in the future and arguably climate change is a wider expression of this problem. There is a further quirk to this particular story which again has wider implications. China is now the major producer of fur, having overtaken Russia, and in 2013 supplied 65% of Russia’s imports of fur.4
That the China trade figured so prominently in the early days is not surprising since the
European expansion, of which sealers, whalers, and subsequently settlers to New Zealand was a part, was to a substantial degree driven by the lure of the China market. China had been a Golden Fleece since Marco Polo’s widely distributed account of Yuan China had excited
European imagination. It was fabled Cathay that Columbus was seeking on his epic voyage and, significantly, he took a copy of Polo’s Description of the World with him.5 It may well
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be that Marco Polo did not himself go to China and that he, and his ghost writer Rusticelio, stitched together the description from the stories of others, but that is of little consequence.6
As so often, it is perception rather than whatever reality might be that is motivating people, whether they be explorers or businesspeople; this is another theme that will become apparent.
There had been sporadic contact between China and Europe, specifically the Roman Empire, along the Silk Road since the beginning of the Christian era, a trade and intellectual connection across Eurasia which has been given renewed currency recently with Xi Jinping’s grand strategy of ‘Road and Belt’.7
Whatever the previous contacts, it was Marco Polo’s Description that molded European perceptions of an economy far larger and more prosperous than their own:
I assure you that this river runs for such a distance and through so many regions and there are so many cities on its banks that truth to tell, in the amount of shipping it carries and the total volume and value of its traffic, it exceeds all the rivers of the Christians put together and their seas into the bargain.8 There was an element of hyperbole here, but this was an era in which belief of islands with amazons and men with the heads of dogs was prevalent.9 However there was a fundamental truth at the foundation; China was richer and more advanced than Europe.10 Moreover,
Iberian merchants trading with Asia were making profits of 40 per cent and into the 19th century the European nabob returning from the East with untold riches was a staple of
European literature.11 Here, as elsewhere in human affairs, perception is more important than reality, or at least motivates people, and the myth of the China market was very potent. That forms another theme along with its ancillary; perception often changes slower than the reality. China was slipping behind Europe from about the 16th century on, but the reputation
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lingered on; on the other hand the outside world was slow to recognize the resurgence of
China, of the Chinese economy and the potential for trade, from roughly 1949 onwards. 12
It was not all about China of course. There was Japan (which Columbus thought he had found with Cuba), India, and the East Indies (contemporary Indonesia) but China was generally pre- eminent. This brings in another theme, which did not become important until the 19th century but has had a profound impact since then. For the United States, of all parts of the world, outside Europe from which it had emanated, China occupied the pinnacle. It was a component and destination of the Manifest Destiny which drove the republic across the continent to the shores of the Pacific and beyond.13 Thomas J McCormick argues:
Like the frontier, the course of commercialism was often westward. Indeed, of all the world’s mercantile lures, none was more long-lived, more persistent, or more mesmeric than the fabled Far Eastern markets; of all the expansionist developments, none more epic and fateful than the conversion of the Pacific basin into an American lake. …
Finally, in the 1890’s, this trans-Pacific commercialism reached a climacteric marked more by a startling acceleration than by any change in form – a quickening that catapulted America to “great power” status in the western Pacific. That is: under the stimulus of a narrowing marketplace at home and the widening market opportunity of an awakening China, America’s leadership made a conscious, purposeful, integrated effort to solve the economic-social crisis at home by promoting the national interest abroad; by securing, at long last, the southern flank of the north Pacific basin [occupation of the Philippines]; by using America’s most potent weapon, economic supremacy, to being the open door conquest of the China market; by employing the traditional tactics of realpolitik to safeguard that economic stake. 14 All this led to China occupying a special place in the American consciousness, which continues to today. The United States developed a paternalistic, even proprietorial, attitude towards China, due in quite a large part to the missionary effort.15 As a result when, in 1949, the Communists defeated the Nationalists, to whom the US had given considerable support, there was a widespread feeling that China had been ‘lost’, and the question “Who lost
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China?” became one of the heated issues of the McCarthy period.16 This led to two decades of frozen economic and political interaction – the American China scholar John King
Fairbank remarked that during that period Washington had sent more men to the moon than to Beijing.17 This subsequently segued into a debate, still running, on whether there was a
‘lost chance’ in US-PRC relations.18 Of most relevance here is the embargo the United States imposed on trade with China. Embargos, or sanctions more generally, are a favorite tool of
US policy, so much so that the leading American expert on the subject, Gary Hufbauer, once wrote an article for the Washington Post entitled ‘Sanctions-Happy USA’ pointing out that
‘no country in the world has employed sanctions as often as the United States has.’19 It is not difficult to see why. They produce no American casualties, no embarrassing collateral damage (wedding parties bombed by mistake) and since the US economy is larger, usually far larger, than of any target country, the perceived economic damage is slight. Thus it was with China.20 In this case ‘perceived’ is an apposite word. It is clear that the embargo imposed severe costs on China, as was intended not merely hampering economic growth but
21 propelling China into unwise desperate measures- ‘According to Zhang [Shu Guang ], the calamity of the Great Leap Forward and the human suffering experienced in the great three- year famine in China were at least in part caused by the economic sanctions imposed by the
United States’.22 However, and this appears not to have been noticed, the lost opportunity to
American business, and that of its allies (including New Zealand), was huge. Looking back from the vantage point of today where China is such a major play in world trade, and has been for years, it seems clear that the opportunity lost was huge, though precise quantification is probably not possible, and appears not to have been attempted. New Zealand has
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traditionally been seen as an economy exhibiting openness and high levels of trade but that assessment cannot take into account the question of whether trade potential was foregone, not through protectionist regulation, but by eschewing opportunity.23 Figure 1 plots China’s share of total merchandise trade from 1950 through to 2014; detailed figures are given in Table A1 in the Statistical Appendix.24
Fig 1: China’s share of world merchandise trade 1950-2014 12 China's share of world merchandise trade 1950-2014
10
8
6
%share oftotal imports andexports 4 years of lost opportunity
2
- 195019521954195619581960196219641966196819701972197419761978198019821984198619881990199219941996199820002002200420062008201020122014
Source: As Table A1
Writing in the early 1950s, the American economist W.W. Rostow (of Stages of Economic
Growth fame25) gives an interesting appraisal of the situation at that time:
In aggregate terms, foreign trade has never been of major importance for the Chinese economy. Thus, in 1936, for example, per capita imports and exports, including Manchuria, were smaller than in any other country. Moreover, probably at no time did total trade exceed 10 per cent of national product. At the same time, however, foreign trade played a major role in bringing the closed traditional economy of China within the purview of the world economy, thereby providing the impetus for the rise of a small modern
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industry. Broadly speaking, China’s imports and exports evolve along lines typical of a generally underdeveloped and slowly growing economy…..
China traditionally maintained very close economic relations with Great Britain, the United States, Germany, and Japan…. This pattern has been radically altered since the Communist capture of the mainland. Western enterprise and economic influences have been gradually pushed out while intimate ties have been established with the Soviet Union and the Communist bloc as a whole. One the one hand, this process was accelerated by Free World trade controls which compelled mainland China to divert an increasing share of its trade to the Communist bloc. ….The impact of western trade control apparently began to be fully felt only in the second half of 1951….Foreign trade recovered so rapidly from its abnormally low 1950 level that by 1951 it had more or less attained its prewar peak level……..[emphasis added]26 The strong growth in foreign trade continued to the end of the decade and was accompanied by a transformation of the direction of trade, with trade with the West falling away and the great increase being directed towards the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and North Korea27.
This growth was brought to a fairly abrupt end by the Sino-Soviet split and the aftermath of the Great Leap Forward. With trade to the US cut off by the embargo, and that with the West generally much hindered by American pressure, foreign trade languished until 1973 (six years’ before Deng Xiaoping’s Opening Up) when it resumed substantial growth. However,
China did not regain the 2.5% of world trade in held in 1959 until 1993, 14 years after
Opening Up. China’s share has been climbing steadily since then and in 2014 it accounted for
12.4% of world exports, 10.3% of imports and 11.3% of total world trade.28 In 2013 it was first in exports and second in imports, while the United States was the other way round, being second in exports and first in imports.29 Whilst the policies of China and the Soviet Union played a role it is apparent that the main responsibility for the ‘lost opportunity’ lies mainly with the United States hostility to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and specifically its trade embargo.
All this would have been very bemusing the to China traders back in the 18th century when the big obstacle was China’s lack of interest in foreign trade, or more specifically the
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products that in general had to offer. This was an issue which went back to the early trade with the Roman empire, when the Chinese would only accept silver (their currency was based on silver rather than gold) in exchange for the silk so highly prized by Roman matrons; what was called ‘the specie drain’.30 The oft quoted rejection of the trade mission of Lord
Macartney, the emissary of King George III of England by the Qianlong emperor in 1793 exemplifies the Chinese attitude:
The Celestial Court has pacified and possessed the territory within the four seas. Its sole aim is to do its utmost to achieve good government and to manage political affairs, attaching no value to strange jewels and precious objects. The various articles presented by you, O King, this time are accepted by my special order to the office in charge of such functions in consideration of the offerings having come from a long distance with sincere good wishes. As a matter of fact, the virtue and prestige of the Celestial Dynasty having spread far and wide, the kings of the myriad nations come by land and by sea with all sorts of precious things. Consequently there is nothing we lack, as your principal envoy and others have themselves observed. We have never set much store on strange or ingenious objects, nor do we need any more of your country’s manufactures.31 In many ways the Qianlong emperor was correct; there seemed to be nothing that China lacked and the strange and ingenious objects which the foreigners offered to export were not obviously desirable. Yet, of course, the emperor was profoundly mistaken. Macartney himself symbolized the gap between Chinese perception and the new reality. It was
Macartney that coined the phrase about the sun never setting on the British empire and it was from the jewel of that empire, India, that the British found the products that Chinese consumers would embrace – cotton and opium. The Chinese government attempted to stop the import of opium and that led to the Opium War, the establishment of Hong Kong and the various encroachments on Chinese sovereignty that came to some sort of and in 1949. It would be a mistake to put too much emphasis on the opium trade itself, pernicious though it might have been. The many-faceted industrial revolution was to generate an avalanche of new products, ranging from the desirable to the necessary, and nothing could stand in its path.
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China, as other countries, had to learn to cope with this new environment. With hindsight we might conclude that ultimately no country has been more successful in meeting that challenge; it is the world’s leading exporter. However that assessment would be too sanguine; in terms of per capita productivity, value-chain status, regulatory framework, and innovation
China still faces many issues and the race is not yet over, nor will it ever be. Nevertheless
China’s problems bring opportunities, not least for New Zealand business. Identifying those problems and seeking solutions that will provide sustainable business opportunity - solutions that are frequently and increasingly services rather than physical products -is yet another theme.32
The China trade and the European settlement of New Zealand
The New Zealand sealers had fortuitously set upon a product which found a ready market in
China. The first consignment landed in Guangzhou [Canton] in 1792, one year before the
Macartney mission. Again it was essentially a colonial product, although New Zealand would not become part of the empire until 1840, a half century later, with the Treaty of Waitangi.
However, the China trade was a potent reason for colonization, all the more so because it was suspected that the Americans had somewhat the same thing in mind. John Thomas Bigge, a royal commissioner in the colony of New South Wales reported to the British Secretary of
State, Lord Bathurst, in 1823 following a visit to the Bay of Islands then the main area of
European settlement in New Zealand suggested that:
…it might be deemed expedient to give encouragement to the colonization of New Zealand. Whenever the China market shall become accessible to English vessels, the value of New Zealand, as a place of deposit for the produce of the whale seal fisheries, cannot fail to attract [settlers] to its harbours. The Americans, who are freely admitted to the China market, are already sensible of the advantages to be derived from an intercourse with the New Zealanders [i.e. Māori], and will succeed in establishing it, notwithstanding the partiality and preference that the natives entertain for the subjects of Great Britain…33
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The constraint on access to the China market to which Commissioner Bigge refers, was that by the East India Company wanting to keep its monopoly on British trade with China.34 In fact, it appears that most New Zealand sealskins that were exported to China were carried by
American merchants.35
European expansion was to a significant degree driven by the myth of the China market and within that broader historical sweep the British colonization of New Zealand owed a lot to the practical considerations of the reality of the China trade, and the desire to keep competitors at bay. In commercial terms this was a one-way process. China did not prohibit trade, although it did keep the foreigners in Guangzhou, as far away from the capital as feasible. However, it did not actively seek trade in the way that the Europeans did. This was not to say that there was no interest in the West and the outside world in general or that the Chinese were particularly xenophobic.36 On the contrary, over the millennia China had a lot of intellectual intercourse with foreigners as evidenced, if by nothing else, by the spread of Buddhism, and to a far lesser extent, Islam. Moreover Jesuits, of which Matteo Ricci was the most famous, had been valued, even to having access to the emperor, because of their knowledge, particularly of astronomy, geography, map making and the manufacture of cannon. 37 Indeed, it was Jesuit, the Flemish Ferdinand Verbiest (1623-88) who first introduced the knowledge of New Zealand, and Australia, to the Chinese; or rather he produced a map which incorporated these places just recently discovered by the Dutch although not a discovery to the people who lived there).38 New Zealand was translated/transliterated into Chinese as Xin
Selandiya from the Latinized version of the Dutch name – Zeelandia Nova; the Xin being the
Chinese word for ‘new’ and the rest of the name being rendered phonetically.39 However,
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being on the map is one thing, but being a place of interest for trade or any other reason, is another matter. The Dutch had shown no interest in these southern lands, which must have seemed very unappealing after the lushness of the East India, and no doubt this impression was conveyed to the Chinese. So here is another theme, that of asymmetry. China was large in terms of land and population, rich in terms of produce such as silk, rice, and tea, and possessing a long recorded history. It was known, however imperfectly, through much of the world and was much sought after. The contrast with New Zealand was marked. Even the sealskins which made their way, briefly, to the China market were from the sea around New
Zealand rather than the land itself. The configuration of asymmetry would change over the years but it remains a salient characteristic of the China-New Zealand relationship today.
However, asymmetry also has implications of complementarity and it is complementarity which lays a firm foundation for trade. Countries do not have to be complementary to engage in trade – both England and Portugal in David Ricardo’s famous exposition of comparative advantage produced cloth and wine – but having very different, yet mutually attractive, endowments greatly strengthens the case for trade.
People –evangelists, traders, sojourners and citizens
People, either as individuals or as groups, play a complex role in the bilateral economic relationship. Sometimes that is indirect and diffuse, and the relevance not immediately apparent. In particular knowledge that was the byproduct of other activities had a life of its own that continued long after the original action. But equally, the implementation of the original purpose established a precedent which also had a continued existence. The Jesuit missionaries, such as Matteo Ricci and Ferdinand Verbiest, disseminated knowledge in both
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directions, about China to the rest of the world, and about the world, or what they considered the important part of it, to China. The latter was, of course, the main reason for them going to
China. They were, after all evangelists, and if they were valued in China for their secular knowledge, their purpose was conversion.40 The missionary enterprise in China had a profound impact in various ways. Christianity inspired the leaders of the Taiping rebellion, the suppression of which devastated China in the mid-19th century, and was one of the reasons for the emigration of Chinese from Guangdong to, amongst other places, New
Zealand. Missionaries won converts but also fueled anti-foreign movements, such as the
Boxers, though how much of this was due to their association with imperialism is uncertain.
Much of what the outside world knew about China was refracted through missionary eyes.
New Zealanders participated in this enterprise, most notably Kathleen Hall (1896-1970), a missionary nurse who was active in rural China during the 1930s. During that period she cooperated with Norman Bethune, the Canadian doctor working with the Communist 8th
Route Army, who was commemorated by Mao Zedong in a famous essay ‘In Memory of
Norman Bethune’, by smuggling medical supplies through Japanese lines. In her retirement in New Zealand she was one of the founders of the New Zealand China Society, the forerunner of the New Zealand China Friendship Society, discussed below.41 Not well known in New Zealand, her status in China was reflected in 1996 when the China People's
Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries published a collection of short biographies of 362 foreign "friends of China" which included three New Zealanders – Hall, Rewi Alley
42 and the trader Vic Percival. There were other missionaries, including Alexander Don (1857-
1934) whose function was not to go to China but to proselytize the Chinese gold-miners in
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Otago. He was unsuccessful in converting the Chinese but he became the main source of information on that community.43
However, the most famous evangelist was not a missionary, nor even a Christian. Rewi Alley is described in the Dictionary of New Zealand biography as a ‘farmer, teacher, social reformer, peace activist, writer’.
44 He was also an evangelist for China, specifically ‘New China’. Pilloried by the New
Zealand establishment during the ‘years of lost opportunity’ he was later shamelessly appropriated by the government as a symbol of the by now respectable and profitable relationship with China and lionized in retrospect.
In the late 1930s he was active in establishing the Industrial Co-operatives (INDUSCO) whose slogan, Gung Ho in the transliteration of the time, meaning ‘work together’ [gong he] was ironically transmogrified in American usage to mean something rather different, especially in its adoption by the US marines where it acquired meanings such as 'to move aggressively,' and 'to bulldoze one's way'.45
Rewi Alley spent much of his time, especially his later years, in trying to explain the Chinese revolution to the world, and so to New Zealand. In this he had not much success and his work went largely unnoticed in his home country; but not completely. The attempts to denigrate him and to harass him, for instance by withdrawing his passport, was a compliment of sorts.
Ironically, and cruelly, it was in China that he made his mark becoming probably the most famous ‘foreign friend of China’ and by the 1980s, with the growth of the China market, he
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was being sort out by New Zealand officials ‘… who wanted to use him as the icon of New
Zealand-China economic relations. He now had a trade value.’46
Although Alley did not have much impact on New Zealand attitudes towards China, and does not appear to have been interested in developing the economic relationship, he was instrumental in establishing what became the New Zealand China Friendship Association
(NZCFS). The origins and objectives of the NZCFS were described by its historian, Alistair
Shaw:
The Society was born in 1952 of ‘the necessity for a sane policy towards the newly established People’s Republic of China’. Its initial goal was for diplomatic recognition by New Zealand of the PRC and one of its aims was ‘To clear the mists of ignorance and provide accurate information leading to mutual understanding and mutual respect between our two peoples’.47 How much effect it had on New Zealand public opinion is uncertain. Probably very little but the fact that the government was involved in a ‘dirty tricks’ campaign against Rewi Alley, accusing him, inter alia, of pederasty, suggests there might have been some.48 As for recognition, although the NZCFS may have done something to set the climate of opinion, especially in the Labour Party, it was ultimately a matter of wider geopolitical forces.
New Zealand, like Australia, had been in a quandary over recognition with conflicting messages from the two loci of imperial guidance.49 Washington was vehemently opposed but
London, concerned with the vulnerability of its colony of Hong Kong, had established relations with the new Chinese government in January 1950 (that is five months before the outbreak of the Korean War). Britain was no less hostile to the PRC than Washington, evidenced for instance by its voting to keep the China seat in the United Nations Security
Council in the hands of the Nationalist rump government on Taiwan, rather than transferring
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it to Beijing, as well as its intervention in Korea, so diplomatic relations remained frosty. This experience was conveyed to Canberra, and presumably Wellington.50
However, times changed and by the early 1970s the United States was on the cusp of a dramatic volte face, the move by Kissinger and Nixon to ‘play the China card’ against the
Soviet Union by a rapprochement with Beijing which led, at the end of the decade to the establishment of diplomatic relations (under Carter). It was inevitable that New Zealand (and
Australia) would follow suite but national politics in both countries played an important part in the actual mechanics. In both countries the long-reigning conservative governments were replaced by the opposition – the Labor Party in Australia under Gough Whitlam and the
Labour Party in New Zealand under Norman Kirk.51 One of Whitlam’s campaign issue was repairing relations with China and he visited Beijing prior to the election in July 1971
(preceding Kissinger by a week) and one of the first acts on taking office in 1972 was to start the process of diplomatic relations. The Australian example was important because there was a considerable amount of trans-Tasman rivalry between the two sister parties on China as on other issues; not so a race to see who could get to Beijing first, but on the New Zealand side a desperate desire not to be upstaged by the more forthright Australians.52 The failure to establish diplomatic relations prior to 1972 was of New Zealand’s doing and when overtures were made, through the respective permanent representatives at the UN in New York, Beijing agreed within a week.53
There is something rather bizarre and unreal in the narrative, as recounted by David McCraw, of New Zealand’s long-running deliberations, from 1949 to 1972, whether to ‘recognize
China’.54 After all, the disparity in size between the two, one a small country, the other the
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largest in the world, made the question rather redundant. The reality was that the real decisions were being taken elsewhere; mainly in Washington but also in Beijing itself, and in
London and Canberra. New Zealand seemed like a cork in a river, with little control over its movements. That this was largely a matter of perception and fear – of offending the
Americans, of being left behind by the Australian, on being ‘soft on Communism’- did not lessen the impotence. There was some talk of economic opportunities being lost; Warren
Freer, the Labour Party's spokesman on trade and industry did make the point at the party conference in 1971 ‘that it was essential that New Zealand not continue to ignore her [China]
- both as a Pacific power and a nation with tremendous trading potential’.55 However there was little sign of strategic insight, of a realization that the world in which New Zealand had lived and thrived for over a century, was coming to a close.56 This was not only a matter of the US-China rapprochement. In fact, for New Zealand, more momentous decisions were being taken in London, not concerning China, but the European Community. McCraw notes, citing Bryce Harland, New Zealand’s first ambassador to the PRC, that
Although the expansion of trade was a very important goal of New Zealand's foreign policy in the wake of Britain's efforts to enter the European Community, it played little part in the establishment of official relations with China. Not only was it not the main reason for Kirk's move, but it was hardly even a secondary consideration at the time.57 In fact, Britain’s move to join the European Community (subsequently the European Union) was to turn New Zealand’s external economic relations upside down. Britain moved quickly from being the centerpiece, sometimes taking up to 90% of New Zealand exports, to a minor market (Fig 2). Asia, which although it had at times an important position as a market had not taken an appreciable share of exports in the past rapidly was transformed from being an added extra in New Zealand’s export portfolio to a necessity.58 Although Japan had occupied
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the middle ground, as evidenced by the 1938 trade treaty and its prominence in the postwar period though to the end of the 20th century, it was China that dominated the early period, and ultimately the contemporary, and presumably the future, trade.
Fig 2: Asia and Britain in the direction of New Zealand exports 1859-1997
100%
90%
80% Britain
70%
60%
50%
40% Share of total exports Share Asia 30%
20% Commercial treaty with Japan Early exports to China 10% Britain Asia
0% 1868 1878 1888 1898 1908 1918 1928 1938 1948 1958 1968 1978 1988 June years
Source: Beal, Tim. "The Colonial Daughters leaving Home: The NZ response to Asia in a Comparative Perspective." New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 1, no. 1 (June 1999): 7-41. Fig 4
It is difficult to quantify the effect on trade of the lack of diplomatic relations, and the concomitant hostility of the New Zealand government towards the PRC. The diplomat Chris
Elder, and one time ambassador to China, claims that ‘Individual traders took advantage of the government’s ‘hands-off’ attitude to begin business in a small way’, but this may be putting a positive gloss on things.59 The government may not have prohibited trade from the mid-1950s onwards, but it did not encourage it. Moreover the New Zealand government’s
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position must have affected the attitude of Chinese companies, then under state control, to do business with New Zealand. The reported comment of a Chinese official to Ron Smith in the
1960s bears this out:
In China, trade is by the State and officers running it are cadres of the state. So naturally we consider trade on the basis of the relations between the two countries. New Zealand has taken unfriendly actions against China in the United Nations. The Chiang Kai Shek' Government' was granted Embassy status in Wellington, Chinese officials had met Australian and Canadian officials but in New Zealand only trading companies, at present there are obstacles and the key lies with the New Zealand Government.60 Shaw was visiting as part of a New Zealand Communist Party delegation and his interlocutor would have stressed the political aspect. Traders such as Ron Howell and Vic Percival may have got a rather more pragmatic and nuanced message. Howell has been described as a ‘a left-leaning Auckland businessman’ and Vic Percival was at one time deputy chairman of the
Auckland division of the National Party.61 The way that Percival straddled the two political cultures was illustrated by his remark, apropos the political statements he (and other pre-
1990s visitors to China) had to sit through: “I just listened politely and then ‘Let’s get on with business.”62 The irony was that it was primarily the United States that inserted politics into the economic relationship, and New Zealand, by following the US line on recognition, though not on trade restrictions, was doing the same.
In short, it seems safe to say that trade would have grown much faster if the New Zealand government had had normal relations with the PRC, and had actively promoted economic links as it did with other countries.
The NZCFS does not seem to have positioned trade in its mission statement but it did much to stimulate the economic relationship by promoting a friendly climate of opinion, more in
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China than in New Zealand. The Canterbury University economist Wolfgang Rosenberg was one of the founder members and the trader Ron Howell was National President of the 1962-
68 and 1974-1977.63 Ethnic Chinese were not a major force in the NZCFS especially during the early period, with those Chinese New Zealanders who were supportive of the ‘New
China’ perhaps fearful of their vulnerability in an anti-Communist and still fairly racist environment, but there were exceptions, such as Jim Wong, Jock Hoe, and the redoubtable despite being diminutive Nancy Goddard (nee Kwok).64 However, Chinese New Zealanders did have an important impact on the economic relationship, stretching back into the 19th century
The Chinese gold diggers were an example of a case where there were consequences which spread beyond the original purpose. They came in search of gold and those who stayed when the gold ran out, becoming migrants rather than sojourners (despite the best efforts of the government and much of the population to make them unwelcome) provided a market for imports from China as well as identifying export opportunities:
For the first twenty years after the signing of the Waitangi Treaty, no significant growth in bilateral trade was recorded. Apart from the haphazard trade in small quantities of greenstones and other insignificant items, the only important item of import from China was Chinese tea to cater to the needs of the increasing English settlers. It was not until the middle of the 1860s, with the influx of Chinese immigrants into New Zealand, that a new era of New Zealand-China trade began. Firstly, the growing Chinese population demanded a great variety of consumption goods from China (and Hong Kong) to cater to their specific needs and tastes. These goods were often not otherwise available in New Zealand. This provided the basis for the continuous imports from China. Secondly, the Chinese gold miners, who constituted the majority of the Chinese population for more than two decades, contributed to the growth of the gold industry, and gold exports of New Zealand. Thirdly, the Chinese settlers helped identify trade opportunities which would otherwise remained unexplored and they created exports which would otherwise not have been brought into existence. The export of fungus was a case
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in point.65 This quotation from William Tai Yuan gives a rather incomplete and too sanguine an impression, leaving racist anti-Chinese sentiment out of the picture. Discounting Gavin
Menzies’ fanciful Ming explorers,66 the first Chinese settler was recorded arriving in 1842, just two years after the Treaty of Waitangi. However, it was not until the gold rush of the
1860s that Chinese arrived in any substantial number, reaching a 19th century peak of 4,995 in 1881 (of which only 9 were women). After the gold ran out the numbers subsided though many stayed on, many not having funds to go elsewhere, or back to China, and they often established market gardens or greengrocers. It was not until the late 1950s or early 1960s that the Chinese population exceed the 1881 level.67 There was a certain amount of immigration, mainly of Chinese from Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan but the big surge, this time increasingly of mainlanders did not occur until the liberalization of immigration laws in
1987.68
The treatment of Chinese in New Zealand was appalling. To be sure there were no pogroms or riots, and only one racist murder, in 1905 when ‘anti-Chinese extremist Lionel Terry shot dead an elderly, disabled ex-miner, Joe Kum Yung, at random in Haining Street [Wellington] just to raise public awareness of what he saw as the Asiatic threat.’69 Many agreed with
Terry about the ‘Asiatic threat’ but few condoned the murder. He was declared insane and incarcerated for the rest of his life; a politically convenient solution.70 The Chinese bore the brunt of widespread racism and government discrimination. The history of the Chinese in
New Zealand (as elsewhere, most pertinently in Australia) is a mélange of racism, exaggerated fear of being swamped by the ‘yellow peril’, shared imperialist fantasies about
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the lesser races and the civilizing mission of the European, and anxiety about the impact on wages and standard of living of large-scale ‘cheap’ immigration. The anxiety was not entirely misplaced. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, the businessman who had been active in settling British colonists, mainly for farming, in South Australia and in New Zealand also dreamed of bringing in Chinese ‘to became valuable servants, as shepherds and stock- keepers, mechanics….workers in the dairy, sawyers, fishermen, gardeners, cooks, grooms, footmen, etc.’71. A permanent sub-class, if not quite the indentured laborers that were conveyed around the world from China (and India) across the empire, from the Malay States,
Fiji to the Caribbean. Politicians articulated these fears; Richard Seddon for instance, the most prominent politician of his times (earning him the sobriquet ‘King Seddon’) railed against British plans to import indentured Chinese laborers into the Transvaal.72 It was part of a struggle between the emerging white settle democracy and the desire of capital to shift labor wherever in the world it could be profitably exploited. Since New Zealand was not suitable for plantations the settlers won, but in the meantime the Chinese in Zealand suffered racism and discrimination.
There was an element of closure to this sorry business with the historic ‘apology’ of then
Prime Minister Helen on the occasion of Chinese New Year in 2002:
I wish to announce today that the government has decided to make a formal apology to those Chinese people who paid the poll tax and suffered other discrimination imposed by statute and to their descendants.73
The Prime Minister’s apology, however admirable, was of not the end of the story and racism and anti-Chinese sentiment continue to bedevil the economic relationship.
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As usual, there are elements of irony and coincidence link past and future. The remaining vestiges of the hard, and discriminated, life of the China gold miners in 19th Otago are being preserved and turned into an attraction for tourists, not least those from China.74 Similarly that historic link provides a rational for establishing a sister-city link between the old mining town of Alexandra and a Chinese county. 75
Islam provides another link. According to Douglas Pratt:
The first Muslim migrants to New Zealand were mostly Chinese. Some 17 ‘Mahometans’, as Muslims were then known, all male, and of whom 15 were Chinese working the gold fields in the South Island, were recorded in the government census of April 1874.76
This more than an historical curiosity in that it alerts us to the fact that China is quite a substantial Islamic market in its own right. By a rough calculation (multiplying the GDP by the percentage of the population who are Muslim) in 2006 it was the 14th largest ‘Islamic economy’ in the world, a long way behind Indonesia but ahead of more obvious countries such as Iraq.77 No doubt since then it has increased in importance. Halal trade – products ranging from meat to financial services – targeted at Muslim customers is a growth area of opportunity for New Zealand.78 This is not merely a matter of China being an important halal market in its own right, but also as a conduit to the broader Islamic world, especially to
China’s west, along the New Silk Road and more broadly still, via the Maritime Silk Road, to the Muslim lands from East Africa across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia. In other words, the
Belt and Road strategy. 79 We will return to this more fully in Chapter Seven.
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This brings us to the broader issue of how New Zealand utilizes New Zealanders, both in themselves and as part of a wider network, as a business resource. This is by no means as straightforward matter, although New Zealand companies often fall into the trap of thinking so.80 Similarly, Government has often failed to analyze the dynamics of immigration, often falling back on simplistic stereotypes and assumptions. For instance the business migration schemes which are described as ‘designed to contribute to economic growth, attracting
‘smart’ capital and business expertise to New Zealand, and enabling experienced business people to buy or establish businesses in New Zealand’81 were often based on the assumption that rich people from fast growing economies, especially in Asia, would inject not merely capital but a bursting, entrepreneurial spirit. However, as Manying Ip., amongst others, has pointed out in respect of ethnic Chinese, Many also came in search of a more relaxed lifestyle and a less competitive education system for their children’.82 Those who were still economically active rather than stimulating New Zealand with their entrepreneurial energies often followed ‘...the ’astronaut’ pattern, in which men return to their place of origin to continue their business, supporting their families from overseas’.83 They tended to find the business environment both unfamiliar and less promising than that at home. Those that did stay were often more interested in the golf course than the bourse.84
The early trade between New Zealand and China
Trade between New Zealand and China started off, as we have seen, with great élan and enthusiasm, but lack of governance, fairly inevitable in the circumstances, meant that the seal harvest was grossly exploited and soon depleted. Seal harvesting began in New Zealand in
1792 but by the 1830s it was no longer of any importance, being no more than a by-catch of
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the whaling industry.85 Over-exploitation, with little or no regard to ecological consequences, is a familiar story with alarming contemporary relevance, both on a global scale, and to New
Zealand – at sea with the virtual extinction of Orange Roughy fisheries.86 On land pollution due to dairy farming is a major issue, and of great relevance to this book since dairy products are central to the economic relationship with China.
Even though it was quite shorted-lived, the seal trade had an impact beyond its monetary value in that it gave impetus to the British settlement, and colonization of New Zealand. In fact it brought little economic benefit to anyone in New Zealand, Māori or Pākehā, since the sealers operated out of Australia, and the skins went directly back there before being exported to London, or to China. The Americans, who were not hampered by the monopoly of the
China trade by the East India Company, controlled the exports to China. As far as the
Chinese were concerned, if they wondered about the provenance of the prized sealskins, they would have considered them American.
Apart from sealskins New Zealand of that period, and indeed up to fairly recent times, had little to offer China. Before the European transformation, New Zealand land was poor in both fauna and flora. The seas, of course, were another matter but they were essentially hunting grounds, open to all but because of technological limitations of no great export potential.
There were some exports of spars and pounamu (greenstone) but the amounts were small.
The early 1840s saw two important geopolitical developments. The Treaty of Waitangi in
1840 established British sovereignty over New Zealand which now became officially apart of the world-trade system. The defeat of China in the First Opium War led to the first of the
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‘Unequal Treaties, Treaty of Nanking in 1842 which abolished the old Canton system and ceded Hong Kong to Britain. New Zealand was thus linked to China via the British Empire.87
From a historian’s point of view this provided both framework and documentation:
These treaties not only provided the framework for the growth of trade between New Zealand and China, but also enabled exports and imports between the two countries to be properly recognized and recorded as trade between New Zealand and China.88
There was, however, little to record. When the first New Zealand trade returns were published in 1859 (Table 1) exports to China were tiny; just £4,925, or 0.9% of the total.
Nevertheless, China was New Zealand’s third largest export market. This curious situation was to continue into the 20th century, and has led Tai to write:
However, China was by no means a negligible trading partner. For most of these years [ 1865 to 1911, the end point of his study] China was far ahead of all continental European countries combined in terms of the total value of trade. For some of these years China was New Zealand’s fifth or sixth largest trading partner. In Asia it was often New Zealand’s leading or second trading partner after India or Singapore.89
This is misleading. China’s position was a statistical anomaly produced by the extreme focus of the direction of exports. It will be seen that the UK and Australia between them took nearly 97% of exports. This meant that a slight change in the value of trade with any of the other countries could alter the ranking, other than that of the top two. No other market was significant. This is reiterated by looking at the trade returns for 1882 (Table A2 in the
Statistical Appendix). The inexorable rise of the United States, naturally a major trading partner, and now no 3, with nearly 6% of trade, is an indication of a slight maturing of New
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Zealand’s foreign trade. Notice also the appearance of Japan. However, after the US, the share of other countries fall to 2 % or less, and Mauritius becomes the fifth largest trading partner, reflecting probably the vagaries of how goods in transit were recorded.
Table 1: Direction of NZ exports, 1859
Country £ %
Total 551,484 100.0%
United Kingdom 317,045 57.5%
Australia 215,640 39.1%
China 4,925 0.9%
Peru 3,451 0.6%
India 4,215 0.8%
Mauritius 2,250 0.4%
Guam 499 0.1%
United States of America 13 0.0%
Java 12 0.0%
Whale fishery 2758 0.5%
Other 676 0.1%
Source: Statistics of New Zealand, 1859; see note to Statistical Appendix in Beal, Tim. "The Colonial Daughters leaving Home: The NZ response to Asia in a Comparative Perspective." New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 1, no. 1 (June 1999): 7-41.
In addition, Australia’s position was somewhat ambiguous, being both a destination in its own right, and a transit point on the way to the UK and this has fluctuated over the years.
This is illustrated by the direction of exports in 1937, a very significant year with portents of things to come. In that year Australia slipped to 4th place, with just 3% of exports, behind
Japan, with 5%. Although Britain’s predominance as an export market was still
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overwhelming, and would remain so until after the Second World War, exports to a number of other countries was now quite substantial. China was not amongst them but Japan was and there was even a trade treaty signed. Important of course in its own right, Japan can also be seen here as a dress rehearsal for China. There are the asymmetries – it is much larger, with a very different culture and business structure. There is great complementarity, even greater than that with China, who is also a substantial exporter of agricultural produce. And then there is the impact of geopolitical events. 1937 was the year that Japan invaded China, starting the Pacific War than ended in1945. That put paid to the promise of the trade treaty between New Zealand and Japan, and the following Cold War put paid for decades any hope of substantial trade between New Zealand and China. Ironically, the Asian hot points of the
Cold War, the Korean and Vietnam wars, reinvigorated the Japanese economy and Japan from the 1950s onwards rapidly again became a major market and, for a period, NZ's largest market.
Table 2: NZ's major export markets, 1937
£ %
Total 66,207,998 100%
UK 50,617,792 76%
USA 4,840,972 7%
Japan 3,127,733 5%
Australia 1,692,595 3%
Canada 1,674,034 3%
France 1,014,864 2%
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Source: Source: Statistics of New Zealand, 1859; see note to Statistical Appendix in Beal, Tim. "The Colonial Daughters leaving Home: The NZ response to Asia in a Comparative Perspective." New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 1, no. 1 (June 1999): 7-41.
Politics may stimulate or hinder trade but that ultimately depends on the supply of products and demand for them. 19th and early 20th century New Zealand had little to offer that was of interest to China and it was not until the latter part of the 20th century that China developed an economic demand for the products that New Zealand had to offer. However there were harbingers of things to come, and opportunities to be realized when the situation was more propitious. This was symbolized by Chew Chong in Taranaki, and his exports of fungus (and later scrap iron) to his native land. Chong was not the only Chinese who left his mark on 19th century New Zealand. There was, for instance, Choie Sew Hoy who developed new techniques that extended the life of the Otago goldfields.90 But Chong had a rather special impact on his adopted country. Between 1872 and 1904 he exported an estimated 8,339.9 tons of fungus, valued at £309.343. His activities stimulated others, including John Reid whose company bought fungus from both Maori and European settlers for export, even appointing an agent in China for direct trade. Tai notes that:
This export trade generated profits for the traders, income for the fungus collectors, and export earnings for the country. Likewise, the scrap iron export trade was also started by Chew Chong, a testimony to the effectiveness of Chinese networking in the promotion of New Zealand trade.91
This is still, in the 21st century, unfinished business. The utilization of networks and knowledge of home markets, and the potential for New Zealand produce, of Chinese (and other) migrants groups in developing exports is by no means fully realized. Similarly, the role of trade promotion agencies, government and private, in going beyond the conventional
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identification and expansion of overseas markets for New Zealand’s traditional products, into ascertaining what New Zealand could produce for foreign markets is still undeveloped. This is, in essence, moving from a selling approach to a marketing one.
Fungus was only part of Chew Chong’s activities. Because the fungus industry was gendered, with women and children collecting the fungus (usually known as mu’er, or wood ear in
Chinese) while the men worked in the dairy industry, he was drawn into that as well and became a pioneer of the New Zealand butter industry, and its refrigerated export to foreign markets, mainly England.92
If 19th century New Zealand struggled to find products to export, imports were a rather different matter. As Table 3 shows the balance of trade was strongly negative for the period
1881-1991, except for the years 1901-4 where a consignment of oats to the Mainland in 1901 and coal to Hong Kong, shifted the balance temporarily.93
The issue of Hong Kong has constantly bedeviled the statistics of trade with China.
Sometimes when the word ‘China’ is used it includes trade with Hong Kong, sometimes it does not. In the sense that Hong Kong was, and still is, an entrepȏt – a conduit for trade with the Mainland – then combining the two is the correct course. But Hong Kong is also a consumer of the goods traded through it and especially in the period after 1949, an important manufacturing economy in its own right. On occasions it is possible to disentangle the trade but this takes a lot of work which is often not justified in the context of the research. An exception perhaps is during the period of the American embargo when goods to and from the
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Mainland were labeled ‘Hong Kong.’94 Post-colonial Hong Kong the Hong Kong Special
Administrative Region(SAR) is still a separate customs area so this is a continuing issue but as it declines in importance relative to the economy of the PRC as a whole it become less important.
Table 3: New Zealand - China Trade 1881-1911
Year Imports Exports Balance X/I% Total %NZ £ £ £ % £ % 1881 149,228 11,098 -138,130 7.4 160,326 1.1 1882 173,371 18,835 -154,536 10.9 192,206 1.2 1883 138,959 16,885 -122,074 12.2 155,844 1 1884 128,499 13,762 -114,737 10.7 142,261 0.9 1885 153,609 13,940 -139,669 9.1 167,549 1.1 1886 170,044 9,217 -160,827 5.4 179,261 1.3 1887 186,870 19,067 -167,803 10.2 205,937 1.5 1888 183,049 15,423 -167,626 8.4 198,472 1.4 1889 111,621 19,907 -91,714 17.8 131,528 0.8 1890 59,421 16,837 -42,584 28.3 76,258 0.4 1891 40,718 7,972 -32,746 19.6 48,690 0.3 1892 51,866 4,109 -47,757 7.9 55,975 0.3 1893 37,039 4,796 -32,243 12.9 41,835 0.2 1894 26,422 3,838 -22,584 14.5 30,260 0.1 1895 38,664 4,680 -33,984 12.1 43,344 0.2 1896 39,427 8,268 -31,159 21.0 47,695 0.2 1897 43,390 6,773 -36,617 15.6 50,163 0.2 1898 32,916 10,899 -22,017 33.1 43,815 0.2 1899 22,879 10,973 -11,906 48.0 33,852 0.1 1900 22,448 13,577 -8,871 60.5 36,025 0.1 1901 33,569 45,199 11,630 134.6 78,768 0.3 1902 31,170 66,396 35,226 213.0 97,566 0.4 1903 24,573 57,907 33,334 235.7 82,480 0.3 1904 21,176 36,104 14,928 170.5 57,280 0.2 1905 19,096 13,689 -5,407 71.7 32,785 0.1 1906 20,263 12,099 -8,164 59.7 32,362 0.09 1907 18,525 11,963 -6,562 64.6 30,488 0.08 1908 24,399 7,094 -17,305 29.1 31,493 0.09 1909 24,359 11,397 -12,962 46.8 35,756 0.1
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1910 30,332 19,627 -10,705 64.7 49,959 0.1 1911 35,280 8,139 -27,141 23.1 43,419 0.1 Source: Derived from Table II in Tai , Yuen William "The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674- 1911." New Zealand Asia Institute, University of Auckland, 2005 Notes: Balance= Exports-Imports; X/I% = Exports as a % of Imports; Total = Exports + Imports ; %NZ = trade with China as a % of total NZ trade
Tai ascribes the preponderance of imports over exports as ‘primarily due to the substantial demand of the Chinese population [in New Zealand] and the importance of Chinese tea...’ but he gives no evidence for this breakdown. Given the small size of the ethnic Chinese community in 19th century New Zealand (4,995 in 1881 out of a total population of 487,889) and their low purchasing power it seems unlikely that they were a major market. Certainly there was a widespread demand amongst New Zealanders at large for Chinese tea. White
Ghosts, Yellow Peril: China and New Zealand 1790-1950 by Stevan Eldred-Grigg is replete with illustrations of advertisements for tea and he claims that in the 19th century the colonists drank twice as much tea per capita as the British.95 Tea might have been the major Chinese import, but it was not the only one:
Cantonese shops were trading in every big town by the late 1870s: their leading stock was tea, porcelain and silks. Other luxury goods were also loaded onto ships bound for the colony. Canterbury gentlefolk bought silken screens, ivory carvings, porcelain bowls, carved ivory card cases and caved stone figures acquired from China.96
By 1850, to the delight of the temperance movement which advocated it as a drink which
"refreshes but does not intoxicate”, tea had ‘the beverage of choice in all classes of society.’97
But whilst tea became firmly a staple of the New Zealand diet that, in time, did not mean
Chinese tea. Tea had originated in China but was not to remain solely there. When we think of Britain of the industrial revolution it is probably ‘dark, Satanic mills’ that come to mind.
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However, Kew Gardens might really be more appropriate. The migration of flora and fauna obviously has happened through history but accelerated greatly with the European expansion.
Potatoes, maize, and tomatoes from the New World to the Old, and horses, sheep, and cattle in the other direction. Europeans also picked up tastes for foreign products which were not suitable for transplanting in Europe – tobacco from North America, coffee from Abyssinia, cocoa from South America, and tea from China. From the 18th century onwards the identification of exotic flora became more methodical, with the British perhaps in the lead. It is significant that James Cook was accompanied on his epic navigational explorations of the
Pacific, during which he mapped New Zealand, by the botanist Joseph Banks.98 If valuable plants could not be made to grow in Britain then no doubt there were other places in the empire in which they would. Hence the transfer of rubber from South America to the Malaya
States, and tea from China to British India (Assam and Ceylon/Sri Lanka). This was to have a severe effect on New Zealand imports from China:
Around 1850, the British East India Company had engaged a Scottish botanist by the name of Robert Fortune to commit one of the biggest corporate thefts in history. His mission was to steal tea plants and seeds from China to be planted in company-controlled territory in the Indian Himalayas. The coup was designed to free Britain from dependency on China as a monopolistic trading partner. By 1900, the success of Fortune's mission led to substantially lower tea prices by supplementing and eventually replacing the expensive Chinese black tea with cheaper tea produced in India. This increased tea consumption throughout the entire British Empire. By 1906, less than one per cent of tea imported into New Zealand was of Chinese origin, and from then on, nearly all tea came from the British colonies in India and Sri Lanka (then known as Ceylon).99 This is reflected in the statistics of New Zealand’s imports from China which declined rapidly in the 1890s (Table 3). However, trade statistics can be very misleading. Just as New Zealand sealskins landed in China in 1792 were labelled as American, so too was much tea from
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China mis-recorded. In 1868, for instance, 73% of tea imports were accredited to Australia,
26% to the UK, and only 0.7% to China even though, at the time, most of it must have originated in China.100
Vagaries of trade statistics aside, the collapse of the Chinese tea trade with New Zealand in the 1980s is evident and it was part of a world-wide trend. Peasant tea production in China could not compete with capitalist plantations in British India either in price or quality.
Without imports of tea, and with little to export New Zealand trade with China languished.
Linkages between the two were also diminished by other factors. In the mid-19th century, with New Zealand imports exceeding exports fourfold, many ships on the return voyage to
Britain would sail in ballast to interim places such as India and China, there picking up further cargo. This may have provided opportunity for small cargoes of New Zealand produce, such as fungus, to be exported to China. In the 1880s refrigeration began to transform the New Zealand sheep industry with refrigerated ships taking cargoes of frozen sheep meat to London with no cause to stop en route in China, or elsewhere.101 New Zealand economy and trade became much more locked into the British market and there was little incentive to look elsewhere for exports. This was a reinforcing process because as New
Zealand exports became more focused on three staples – wool, meat, and dairy produce – then there was little inducement to look to markets that were not receptive because that would have necessitated developing new export products.102
We have limited statistics from the Chinese side to track this decline in trade. Table A2 in the
Statistical Appendix draws on Hsiao Liang-lin’s 1974 study China's Foreign Trade Statistics,
1864-1949.103 This gives data for China’s imports and exports to the world, and to ‘Australia’
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over this period. For reasons which are not given New Zealand is included with Australia
1883-1930. We have no way of telling what share of ‘Australian’ trade during this period was with New Zealand but given the similarities in trade profiles at that period it is likely that it was roughly proportional to population. Both sides of the Tasman, for instance, had a thirst for tea. The New Zealand Official Yearbook 1899 considers New Zealand as one of the
‘Australasian colonies’ and in one of its table gives annual tea consumption per capita for each colony ranging from 9 5 lbs in Western Australia down to 6.4 lbs in Tasmania and New
Zealand. Another table gives the population of New Zealand as 743,463 (‘exclusive of 39,854
Maoris’)104, putting it being New South Wales and Victoria but larger than any of the other
‘Australasian colonies’, with 17% of the total population.
Fig 3: Rough estimate of New Zealand’s share of China’s trade, 1883-1930 0.3 Rough estimate of NZ's share of China's trade, 1883-1930
0.3
0.2
0.2 %share of China's foreigntrade 0.1
0.1
- 1882/84 1885/87 1888/90 1891/93 1894/96 1897/99 1900/02 1903/05 1906/08 1909/11 1912/14 1915/17 1918/20 1921/23 1924/26 1927/29 Source: Derived from Table A3, with population date from The New Zealand Official Year-Book 1899. Wellington1899.
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Tai notes that by the early 20th century (he finishes his account in 1911 with the fall of the
Qing dynasty) trade between China and New Zealand was ‘reduced to a trickle’:
New Zealand was basking in the halcyon days of its colonial economy, securely anchored to the mother country for the export of meat and dairy products. Having overthrown an imperial dynasty and ushered in a period of warlords and internal strife, an enfeebled China did not attract a respectful glance from New Zealand. No serious attempts were made on the part of New Zealand to develop trade with China. New Zealand-China trade remained in the doldrums for four more decades, until a new chapter was opened with the founding of the People’s Republic of China.105
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Brady, Anne-Marie. Friend of China : the myth of Rewi Alley. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. Brooking, Tim. "Economic Transformation." In The Oxford History of New Zealand, edited by Geoffrey W. Rice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Chapman-Smith, Ben. "NZ urged to expand halal trade beyond meat." NZ Herald, 2 July 2012.http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=108168 26 Chen, Jian. "The myth of America's `lost chance' in China: A Chinese perspective in light of new evidence." Diplomatic History 21, no. 1 (Winter97 1997): 77. Clark, Helen. "Address to Chinese New Year celebrations." Beehive.govt.nz, 12 February 2002.http://www.beehive.govt.nz/speech/address-chinese-new-year-celebrations Clark, Paul. "Vic Percival, China Trader." NZ Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 2 (December 2014). Cohen, Warren I. "Symposium: Rethinking the lost chance in China." Diplomatic History 21, no. 1 (Winter97 1997): 71. Cumings, Bruce. Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Denyer, Simon "China promotes ‘Asia-Pacific dream’ to counter U.S. ‘pivot’." Washington Post, 11 November 2014.http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/chinas-promotes- asia-pacific-dream-to-counter-us-pivot/2014/11/11/1d9e05a4-1e8e-4026-ad5a- 5919f8c0de8a_story.html Elder, C J , and M F Green. "New Zealand and China, 1792 - 1972." Paper presented at the Twenty-first Foreign Policy School, Otago University, 1985. Elder, Chris, ed. New Zealand's China Experience Its Genesis, Triumphs, and Occasional Moments of Less than Complete Success. Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2012. Eldred-Grigg, Stevan. White ghosts, yellow peril : China and New Zealand, 1790-1950. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2014. Fensome, Alex. "Chinese settlers sparked some sensational rumours." Dominion Post, 1 December 2014.http://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/63695117/Chinese-settlers- sparked-some-sensational-rumours Finlay, Robert. "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America." Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004). Hall, Mary. "Hall, Kathleen Anne Baird." In Dictionary of New Zealand Biography ]Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 8-Oct-2013], 2000 Harland, Bryce. On our own : New Zealand in the emerging tripolar world. Wellington: Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, 1992. Ho, Wai-Yip. "Mobilizing the Muslim Minority for China’s Development: Hui Muslims, Ethnic Relations and Sino-Arab Connections." Journal of Comparative Asian Development 12, no. 1 (2013): 84-112. Hsia, R. Po-Chia. "Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East, by Mary Laven (review)." The English Historical Review 127, no. 258 (2012). Hsiao, Liang-lin. China's Foreign Trade Statistics, 1864-1949. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1974.
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Hufbauer, Gary Clyde. "Sanctions-Happy USA." Washington Post, 12 July 1998.http://www.petersoninstitute.org/publications/pb/pb.cfm?ResearchID=83 Hufbauer, Gary Clyde, Jeffrey J Schott, Kimberley Ann Elliott, and Barbara Oegg. Economic Sanctions Reconsidered. 3rd ed. Washington DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007. "Investing and doing business in New Zealand." Immigration New Zealand, http://www.immigration.govt.nz/migrant/stream/invest/. Ip, Manying. "New Zealand." In The Encyclopedia of the Overseas Chinese, edited by Lynn Pan. 286-91. Singapore: Archipelago Press and Landmark Books, 1998. Jackson, Kenneth. Open and Closed: Some Historical Dimensions of New Zealand's Participation in the World Economy. Auckland: University of Auckland, Economics Department Working Papers, 2002. Kelly, Andrew "The Australian-American Alliance, Recognition of China and the 1954-55 Quemoy-Matsu Crisis." The Journal of Northeast Asian History 11, no. 2 (Winter 2014). Kifner, John. "John Service, a Purged 'China Hand,' Dies at 89." New York Times, 4 February 1999.http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/04/world/john-service-a-purged-china-hand- dies-at-89.html Laufer, Berthold "Columbus and Cathay, and the Meaning of America to the Orientalist." Journal of the American Oriental Society 51, no. 2 (June 1931): pp. 87-103. Lim, Alvin Cheng-Hin "Africa and China's 21st Century Maritime Silk Road." The Asia Pacific Journal 13, no. 10:1 (16 March 2015). Lindsay, Val, Vivienne Shaw, Tim Beal, Malcolm Cone, Fergus McLean, Michel Rod, and Nick Ashill. Service Success in Asia. Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2011. MacFie, Rebecca. "Sweet smell of success; Raise the red flag." Listener, 24 May 2008.http://www.knowledge-basket.co.nz.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/databases/newztext- uni/view/?d2=innz/text/INNZ/08/18/551808.html Maddison, Angus. "China in the World Economy: 1300-2030." International Journal of Business 11, no. 3 (Summer 2006). Madgin, Diana. "Who Was Kathleen Hall? ." New Zealand China Friendship Association, 2010.http://nzchinasociety.org.nz/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/kathleen-hall-diana- madgin.pdf Mahon, David. "Afternoons with Rewi Alley." North & South, 1 October 2013. Martens, Jeremy. "Richard Seddon and Popular Opposition in New Zealand to the Introduction of Chinese Labour into the Transvaal, 1903-1904." New Zealand Journal of History 42, no. 2 (October 2008). McCormick, Thomas J. China Market: America's quest for Informal Empire 1893-1901. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967. McCraw, David. "Norman Kirk, the Labour Party and New Zealand's Recognition of the People's Republic of China." New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 4, no. 1 (June 2002). Moe, Albert F. "Gung Ho." American Speech 42, no. 1 (1967): 19-30.
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Mortimer, Molly. "Did Marco Polo Go to China?". Contemporary Review v269, no. n1566 (07/01/ 1996): p52(2). Ng, James. "Alexander Don." In Dictionary of New Zealand Biography [Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 7-Jun-2013]. Wellington, 1993 ———. "Chew Chong." In Dictionary of New Zealand Biography [Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 30-Oct-2012], 1993 Penrose, Sandra. "Stuart Doran and David Lee, Australia and Recognition of the People's Republic of China (review)." The International History Review 26, no. 4 (2004): 908- 10. "Plan seeks to preserve Otago's Chinese past." The Press, 6 July 2008.http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/521444/Plan-seeks-to-preserve-Otagos-Chinese- past Polo, Marco, and R. E. Latham [Translation and introduction]. The travels of Marco Polo [in English]. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1958. Pratt, Douglas. "Antipodean angst: encountering Islam in New Zealand." Islam & Christian- Muslim Relations 21, no. 4 (October 2010). Reeves, Keir. "Tracking the Dragon Down Under: Chinese Cultural Connections in Gold Rush Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand." Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 3, no. 1 (1 June 2005). Rostow, W. W. The Prospects for Communist China. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1954. ———. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960. Rudd, Allison. "Laying foundations for Chinese gold rush; Much to admire in model for city garden." Otago Daily Times, 31 March 2007.http://ehis.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/eds/detail/detail?vid=1&sid=4c 99927a-6456-4a5f-a924- 9f621f678d36%40sessionmgr115&hid=117&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxpdmUmc 2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#db=edsinz&AN=edsinz.518388 Scammell, G. V. "After Da Gama: Europe and Asia since 1498." Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (July 2000): 513-43. Scott, John Vian, and Hua Huang. "Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the People’s Republic of China and New Zealand." 22 December 1972 Service, John S., and Joseph (ed) Esherick. Lost chance in China;the World War II despatches of John S. Service. Random House, 1974. Shaw, Alistair. "Telling the Truth About People’s China." Victoria University of Wellington, 2010. Shaw, Alistair "Towards a History of the [New Zealand China] Society: The Early Years." New Zealand China Society, http://nzchinasociety.org.nz/nzcfs-history/. Sheng, Michael M. "Chinese Communist policy toward the United States and the myth of the 'Lost Chance' 1948-1950." Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 3 (July 1994): 28. "Sleeping with a panda, Mary Roberts (Review of New Zealand’s China Experience: Its Genesis, Triumphs, and Occasional Moments of Less than Complete Success edited
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by Chris Elder)." New Zealand Books, 1 June 2013.http://nzbooks.org.nz/2013/non- fiction/sleeping-with-a-panda-mary-roberts/ Tai , Yuen William. The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911. New Zealand Asia Institute, University of Auckland. Auckland2005. Tait, Theo "Water-Borne Zombies (Review of Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean by Lisa-Ann Gershwin)." London Review of Books, 6 March 2014.http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n05/theo-tait/water-borne-zombies http://fabiusmaximus.com/2014/03/05/jellyfish-ocean-death-65518/ Teng, Ssu-yu, and John K Fairbank. China's response to the West : a documentary survey 1839-1923. New York: Atheneum, 1968. Tod, Frank. "Terry, Edward Lionel." In Dictionary of New Zealand Biography Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 11-Mar-2014. Wellington, 1996 "Trade profiles 2014." https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/publications_e/trade_profiles14_e.htm. Wang, Wen. "Russia imports 65% of its fur from China." China Daily, 15 January 2014.http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-01/15/content_17238094.htm Waters, Sydney David. "Shipping - Overseas and Coastal Lines." In An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, edited by A. H. McLintock, 1966 Weeber, Barry , Karli Thomas, and Cat Dorey. "New Zealand orange roughy " Greenpeace, September 2010.http://www.greenpeace.org/new-zealand/Global/new- zealand/P3/publications/oceans/2010/Orange%20Roughy.pdf Wilson, Aimee. "Central Otago swapping wine and Chinese food as sister city established." Southland Times, 13 November 2007.http://ehis.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.massey.ac.nz/eds/detail/detail?sid=17591d74- e774-46a5-9b69- 29d9d894e918%40sessionmgr114&vid=2&hid=117&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWRzLWxp dmUmc2NvcGU9c2l0ZQ%3d%3d#db=anh&AN=SLT071113-14-2037908V1 Woo, Franklin J. "Liam Matthew Brockey. Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (review)." China Review International 15, no. 3 (Winter 2008). ———. "Warren I. Cohen. America's Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations (Review)." China Review International 18, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 7. Wood, Frances. "Did Marco Polo go to China?". Asian Affairs 27, no. 3 (10 1996): 296. Yu, Maochun. "Honorable Survivor: Mao's China, McCarthy's America, and the Persecution of John S. Service. By Lynne Joiner (Review)." Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 3 (2010). Zhang, Lulu. "China's Belt and Road Initiative fleshed out." China.org, 29 March 2015.http://www.china.org.cn/business/2015-03/29/content_35185058.htm Zhang, Shu Guang. Economic Cold War : America's embargo against China and the Sino- Soviet alliance, 1949-1963 [in English]. Washington, D.C.; Stanford, Calif.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Stanford University Press, 2001. Zhang, Yongjin. "Shu Guang Zhang. Economic Cold War: America's Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance 1949-1963 (Review)." China Review International 9, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 3.
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1 The phrase ‘Asian invasion’ illustrates the imprecision of much popular sentiment with many people not distinguishing between Chinese and other East Asian, let alone ethnic Chinese from various parts of the Chinese world, from Malaysia to the mainland. It should be noted however, that in New Zealand ‘Asia’ usually means East, or Southeast Asia, and excludes South Asia. In common parlance, ‘Asian’ and ‘Chinese’ are probably used interchangeably. 2 C J Elder and M F Green, "New Zealand and China, 1792 - 1972" (paper presented at the Twenty-first Foreign Policy School, Otago University, 1985). 3 Yuen William Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911, New Zealand Asia Institute, University of Auckland (Auckland2005). P. 93. Tai provides the most detailed study of early New Zealand-China contact, and his chapter five ‘China Trade’ is particularly relevant. 4 Wen Wang, "Russia imports 65% of its fur from China," China Daily, 15 January 2014. 5 Molly Mortimer, "Did Marco Polo Go to China?," Contemporary Review v269, no. n1566 (1996). 6 Frances Wood, "Did Marco Polo go to China?," Asian Affairs 27, no. 3 (1996). 7 "Belt and Road: China's Initiatives on Building Silk Road Economic Belt and 21st Century Maritime Silk Road," Xinhua, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/special/silkroad/; Lulu Zhang, "China's Belt and Road Initiative fleshed out," China.org, 29 March 2015; Simon Denyer, "China promotes ‘Asia-Pacific dream’ to counter U.S. ‘pivot’," Washington Post, 11 November 2014. 8 Marco Polo and R. E. Latham [Translation and introduction], The travels of Marco Polo (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1958). 9 Berthold Laufer, "Columbus and Cathay, and the Meaning of America to the Orientalist," Journal of the American Oriental Society 51, no. 2 (1931). 10 Angus Maddison, "China in the World Economy: 1300-2030," International Journal of Business 11, no. 3 (2006). 11 G. V. Scammell, "After Da Gama: Europe and Asia since 1498," Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 3 (2000). 12 The 16th century is Maddison’s estimate and refers to per capita income. In gross terms, e.g. GDP, China remained a major economy into the 19th century. 13 Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 14 Thomas J. McCormick, China Market: America's quest for Informal Empire 1893-1901 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1967). 15 Franklin J. Woo, "Warren I. Cohen. America's Response to China: A History of Sino-American Relations (Review)," China Review International 18, no. 2 (2011). 16 Maochun Yu, "Honorable Survivor: Mao's China, McCarthy's America, and the Persecution of John S. Service. By Lynne Joiner (Review)," Journal of Asian Studies 69, no. 3 (2010); John Kifner, "John Service, a Purged 'China Hand,' Dies at 89," New York Times, 4 February 1999. 17 Cited by Yongjin Zhang, "Shu Guang Zhang. Economic Cold War: America's Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance 1949-1963 (Review)," China Review International 9, no. 1 (2002). 18 Jian Chen, "The myth of America's `lost chance' in China: A Chinese perspective in light of new evidence," Diplomatic History 21, no. 1 (1997); Warren I. Cohen, "Symposium: Rethinking the lost chance in China," Diplomatic History 21, no. 1 (1997); John S. Service and Joseph (ed) Esherick, Lost chance in China;the World War II despatches of John S. Service (Random House, 1974); Michael M. Sheng, "Chinese
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Communist policy toward the United States and the myth of the 'Lost Chance' 1948-1950," Modern Asian Studies 28, no. 3 (1994). 19 Gary Clyde Hufbauer, "Sanctions-Happy USA," Washington Post, 12 July 1998. 20 Gary Clyde Hufbauer et al., Economic Sanctions Reconsidered, 3rd ed. (Washington DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007). In particular Case 49-1 US ChinCom 21 Shu Guang Zhang, Economic Cold War : America's embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet alliance, 1949-1963 (Washington, D.C.; Stanford, Calif.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press ; Stanford University Press, 2001). 22 Zhang, "Shu Guang Zhang. Economic Cold War: America's Embargo against China and the Sino- Soviet Alliance 1949-1963 (Review)." 23 Kenneth Jackson, Open and Closed: Some Historical Dimensions of New Zealand's Participation in the World Economy (Auckland: University of Auckland, Economics Department Working Papers, 2002). 24 Trade is conventionally divided into Merchandise (i.e .goods) and Services. Historically most trade statistics have only covered merchandise with statistics on services being a fairly recent introduction as services have become more tradeable, and hence have grown in importance. As is common usage, unless otherwise specified trade in this book refers only to merchandise trade. 25 W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960). 26 ———, The Prospects for Communist China (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1954). 27 In 1954 the DPRK (North Korea) accounted for 6.9% of China’s exports; Tim Beal, "Beyond Lips and Teeth: The Economics of the China-North Korea Relationship," in Korea yearbook 2011, ed. Rüdiger Frank, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 28 Table A1 29 "Trade profiles 2014," https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/publications_e/trade_profiles14_e.htm. 30 Tim Beal, The China Trade, East Asia Papers (Glasgow: Department of Marketing, University of Strathclyde, 1984). 31 Cited by Ssu-yu Teng and John K Fairbank, China's response to the West : a documentary survey 1839-1923 (New York: Atheneum, 1968). P. 19 32 Val Lindsay et al., Service Success in Asia (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2011). 33 John Thomas Bigge, "Commissioner Bigge's Report (1823)," in Historical Records of New Zealand, ed. Robert McNab (Wellington: John Mackay Government Printer, 1908). 34 Comment by Chris Elder on Commissioner Bigge’s report; Chris Elder, ed. New Zealand's China Experience Its Genesis, Triumphs, and Occasional Moments of Less than Complete Success (Wellington: Victoria University Press, 2012). 35 Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911. Pp. 95-6 36 ‘Ming China was perhaps xenophobic, but definitely less so than Elizabethan England’; R. Po-Chia Hsia, "Mission to China: Matteo Ricci and the Jesuit Encounter with the East, by Mary Laven (review)," The English Historical Review 127, no. 258 (2012). 37 Franklin J. Woo, "Liam Matthew Brockey. Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579- 1724 (review)," China Review International 15, no. 3 (2008). 38 Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911. Tai does suggest though that since Verbiest’s map incorporated knowledge of New Zealand not known to the Dutch, and only established over a century later by James Cook, in particular its insularity, he may have been using information derived from Chinese navigators. 39 The current Chinese usage is Xin Xilan, a translation/transliteration of New Zealand, or Niu Xilan, a transliteration used in Taiwan 40 Woo, "Liam Matthew Brockey. Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (review)." 41 Diana Madgin, "Who Was Kathleen Hall? ," New Zealand China Friendship Association 2010; Mary Hall, "Hall, Kathleen Anne Baird," in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography ]Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 8-Oct-2013] (2000).http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/5h3/hall-kathleen-anne-baird. 42 Paul Clark, "Vic Percival, China Trader," NZ Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 2 (2014).
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43 James Ng, "Alexander Don," in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography [Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 7-Jun-2013] (Wellington1993).http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/2d13/don- alexander. 44 Roderic Alley, "Alley, Rewi," in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography [Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 22-May-2013] (1998).http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4a10/alley-rewi. 45 Albert F. Moe, "Gung Ho," American Speech 42, no. 1 (1967). 46 David Mahon, "Afternoons with Rewi Alley," North & South, 1 October 2013. 47 Alistair Shaw, "Towards a History of the [New Zealand China] Society: The Early Years," New Zealand China Society, http://nzchinasociety.org.nz/nzcfs-history/. 48 ibid; Mahon, "Afternoons with Rewi Alley; Anne-Marie Brady, Friend of China : the myth of Rewi Alley (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). 49 Andrew Kelly, "The Australian-American Alliance, Recognition of China and the 1954-55 Quemoy- Matsu Crisis," The Journal of Northeast Asian History 11, no. 2 (2014). 50 Sandra Penrose, "Stuart Doran and David Lee, Australia and Recognition of the People's Republic of China (review)," The International History Review 26, no. 4 (2004). 51 The Australians follow the American spelling (Labor) and the New Zealanders, the British (Labour) 52 David McCraw, "Norman Kirk, the Labour Party and New Zealand's Recognition of the People's Republic of China," New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 4, no. 1 (2002). 53 ibid. p. 59 54 As Mary Roberts put it in 2013: ‘In 1972 New Zealand recognised China: how quaint this now sounds.’ "Sleeping with a panda, Mary Roberts (Review of New Zealand’s China Experience: Its Genesis, Triumphs, and Occasional Moments of Less than Complete Success edited by Chris Elder)," New Zealand Books, 1 June 2013. 55 ———, "Norman Kirk, the Labour Party and New Zealand's Recognition of the People's Republic of China." p. 53 56 Even on the instrumental level there seems to have been a lack of awareness. Chris Elder notes in his introduction to the text of the recognition communiqué that the Chinese representative at the United Nations with whom the NZ representative was negotiation was Huang Hua –‘later to become China’s long-serving Foreign Minister, had been James Bertram’s roommate at Yenching University in 1936’;John Vian Scott and Hua Huang, "Joint Communiqué on the Establishment of Diplomatic Relations between the People’s Republic of China and New Zealand," 22 December 1972. There is no indication that any effort was made to utilise this guanxi. 57 McCraw, "Norman Kirk, the Labour Party and New Zealand's Recognition of the People's Republic of China." Bryce Harland, On our own : New Zealand in the emerging tripolar world (Wellington: Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, 1992). 58 Tim Beal, "The Colonial Daughters leaving Home: The NZ response to Asia in a Comparative Perspective," New Zealand Journal of Asian Studies 1, no. 1 (1999). 59 Elder, New Zealand's China Experience Its Genesis, Triumphs, and Occasional Moments of Less than Complete Success. p. 9 60 Cited by Alistair Shaw, "Telling the Truth About People’s China" (Victoria University of Wellington, 2010). p. 107 61 Clark, "Vic Percival, China Trader." 62 Rebecca MacFie, "Sweet smell of success; Raise the red flag," Listener, 24 May 2008. 63 Shaw, "Telling the Truth About People’s China." 64 Shaw, "Towards a History of the [New Zealand China] Society: The Early Years". 65 Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911. 66 Robert Finlay, "How Not to (Re)Write World History: Gavin Menzies and the Chinese Discovery of America," Journal of World History 15, no. 2 (2004). 67 Manying Ip, "New Zealand," in The Encyclopedia of the Overseas Chinese, ed. Lynn Pan (Singapore: Archipelago Press and Landmark Books, 1998). 68 Tim Beal and Farib Sos, Astronauts from Taiwan (Wellington: Steele Roberts, 1999).
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69 Alex Fensome, "Chinese settlers sparked some sensational rumours," Dominion Post, 1 December 2014. 70 Frank Tod, "Terry, Edward Lionel," in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography Biography. Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 11-Mar-2014 (Wellington1996).http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/3t27/terry-edward-lionel. 71 Ip, "New Zealand." 72 Jeremy Martens, "Richard Seddon and Popular Opposition in New Zealand to the Introduction of Chinese Labour into the Transvaal, 1903-1904," New Zealand Journal of History 42, no. 2 (2008). 73 Helen Clark, "Address to Chinese New Year celebrations," Beehive.govt.nz, 12 February 2002. 74 "Plan seeks to preserve Otago's Chinese past," The Press, 6 July 2008; Allison Rudd, "Laying foundations for Chinese gold rush; Much to admire in model for city garden," Otago Daily Times, 31 March 2007. 75 Aimee Wilson, "Central Otago swapping wine and Chinese food as sister city established," Southland Times, 13 November 2007. 76 Douglas Pratt, "Antipodean angst: encountering Islam in New Zealand," Islam & Christian-Muslim Relations 21, no. 4 (2010). 77 Tim Beal, "The Global Islamic Economy," in Islam and the global economy: Malaysian and NZ perspectives (Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2006).http://www.timbeal.net.nz/career/Beal_Islam_Economy_Statistics2.pdf. 78 Ben Chapman-Smith, "NZ urged to expand halal trade beyond meat," NZ Herald, 2 July 2012. 79 Wai-Yip Ho, "Mobilizing the Muslim Minority for China’s Development: Hui Muslims, Ethnic Relations and Sino-Arab Connections," Journal of Comparative Asian Development 12, no. 1 (2013); Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim, "Africa and China's 21st Century Maritime Silk Road," The Asia Pacific Journal 13, no. 10:1 (2015); Zhang, "China's Belt and Road Initiative fleshed out." 80 Tim Beal, Valerie Lindsay, and Kala Retna, "Valuing Multiculturalism: Business Engagement with the Challenge of Multiculturalism," in Asians and the New Multiculturalism in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Jacqui Leckie and Gautam Ghosh (Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 2015). 81 "Investing and doing business in New Zealand," Immigration New Zealand, http://www.immigration.govt.nz/migrant/stream/invest/. 82 Ip, "New Zealand." 83 ibid. 84 Beal and Sos, Astronauts from Taiwan. 85 Much of this section is based on Chapter Five, China Trade, of Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911. Tai provides the most detailed account of the trade between New Zealand and China up to the early 20th century. 86 Theo Tait, "Water-Borne Zombies (Review of Stung! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean by Lisa-Ann Gershwin)," London Review of Books, 6 March 2014; Barry Weeber, Karli Thomas, and Cat Dorey, "New Zealand orange roughy " Greenpeace, September 2010. 87 Stevan Eldred-Grigg, White ghosts, yellow peril : China and New Zealand, 1790-1950 (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2014). P. 25 88 Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911. p.97 89 ibid. 90 Keir Reeves, "Tracking the Dragon Down Under: Chinese Cultural Connections in Gold Rush Australia and Aotearoa, New Zealand," Graduate Journal of Asia-Pacific Studies 3, no. 1 (2005). 91 Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911. p.101 92 James Ng, "Chew Chong," in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography [Te Ara - the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, updated 30-Oct-2012] (1993).http://www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/2c17/chew-chong. 93 Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911. p 99 94 Beal, Hidden Trade: The Role of Hong Kong in Sino-British Trade, 1930-1969. 95 Eldred-Grigg, White ghosts, yellow peril : China and New Zealand, 1790-1950. 96 ibid. p. 69 97 Jo Bind, "Time For Tea," NZ Geographic, May-June 2012.
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98 Banks was instrumental in the development of Kew Gardens 99 Bind, "Time For Tea." 100 Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911.p.102 101 Sydney David Waters, "Shipping - Overseas and Coastal Lines," in An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, ed. A. H. McLintock (1966).http://www.teara.govt.nz/en/1966/shipping-overseas-and-coastal-lines. 102 Tim Brooking, "Economic Transformation," in The Oxford History of New Zealand, ed. Geoffrey W. Rice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). p. 230 103 Liang-lin Hsiao, China's Foreign Trade Statistics, 1864-1949 (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1974). 104 No doubt Aborigines were not merely excluded but, unlike Maori, were not even enumerated. 105 Tai The origins of China's awareness of New Zealand, 1674-1911. p. 104
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