Editor’s note for Monday, April 19, 2021

My thoughts today:

New Zealand’s foreign minister Nanaia Mahuta sent some interesting signals about the small island nation’s attitude to China in a speech earlier today.

She indicated that New Zealand was ‘uncomfortable’ with expanding the remit of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing grouping that it belongs to with Australia, Canada, U.S.A., and the U.K. beyond spying.

But Mahuta’s speech was also “full of subtle rebukes of PRC policy towards New Zealand, the Pacific, other small states, lack of respect of rules-based multilateral order, Hong Kong, Uyghur, cyber attacks,” noted Kiwi scholar Anne-Marie Brady. “For NZ: strong stuff.”

See also this from Stuff (New Zealand): The taniwha and the dragon: Foreign Minister Nanaia Mahuta talks China in major speech.

Our word of the day is “The Chinese side…is positively looking into that” (中方…正在积极研究 zhōngfāng…zhèng zài jījí yánjiū).

This was the coy response a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson gave (in English, Chinese) when asked what Beijing is doing with the invitation from Joe Biden to Xí Jìnpíng 习近平 to attend the U.S.-hosted Leaders Summit on Climate on April 22 and 23.

The word yánjiū 研究, literally “research” or “study,” is here used as a way of fobbing someone off, just like the English “We’re looking into that.” But the word once had another meaning a few decades ago.

When, for example, the telephone installation man said your home phone application needed some extra research, it was a coded way of asking for a bribe, because the near homophones yān 烟 and jiǔ 酒 mean cigarettes and liquor.

Upcoming online events:

• April 22: China’s growing power and the recent surge in anti-AAPI violence.
• April 29: An Indiana-based company working with China in rare earth materials.

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief