Defence Minister Andrew Little has urged China to resume talking with the United States, and has declined a Chinese request for joint military exercises with New Zealand.

Little met Chinese Defence Minister Li Shangfu in Singapore on Friday, on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue defence summit, where military leaders are discussing security in Asia and the growing threat of conflict between the United States and China.

Li had already rejected a request from United States Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin to meet on the sidelines of the summit, quashing an opportunity to defuse a deteriorating relationship.

The refusal to meet set the tone for the three-day summit. In a sweeping keynote speech about how the region could avoid “disaster”, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese chastised China for failing to engage with the US.
Similarly, Little said he told Li directly that, as a small nation, New Zealand needed the great powers to talk to “mitigate risk”.

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"We expect major powers to have points of contact and dialogue, particularly at a time when relationship or when tensions are rising in the region,” he said, in an interview.

“I doubt whether it’s just confined to the US, but they [China] are a significant player, with a large military, and they’re nuclear-armed, and it’s a region where – along with other nuclear powers here – there is rising tension.”

Little said during the “cordial” meeting Li had asked for China and New Zealand to conduct joint military exercises “to deepen the relationship”. New Zealand and China currently hold meetings between senior defence officials.

“We want to maintain a high-level dialogue, but for a range of reasons we’re not in a position to do training and exercises.

“Given current conditions, it’s just not the appropriate time and we should keep our relationship just at that high-level dialogue level.”

Little said he discussed providing further monetary support for Ukraine’s fight against an ongoing Russian invasion during a meeting with the country’s foreign minister, Oleksiy Reznikov. He asked Reznikov to put a request in writing for the Government to consider.

‘Guardrails’ needed: Albanese

In a lengthy speech opening the summit, Albanese called on China to accept a US request to resume high-level dialogue, a request Australia “strongly supports”.

He said dialogue the first and “most fundamental” of the guardrails – barriers to conflict that allow major powers to maintain economic progress – needed to allow “two countries” to firmly disagree without disaster.

"If you don't have the capacity at a decision-making level to pick up the phone, to seek some clarity, or provide some context, and there was always a much greater risk of assumptions spilling over into irretrievable action and reaction.

"The consequences of such a breakdown, whether in the Taiwan Strait or elsewhere, would not be confined to the big powers or the site of their conflict. It would be devastating for the world.”

Albanese insisted that the region’s fate was not “preordained”, and that with respect of countries’ sovereignty and international rules conflict would be avoided.

“If this breaks down, if one nation imagines itself too big for the rules, or too powerful to be held to the standards that the rest of us respect, then our region strategic stability is undermined.”