Contents

Introduction 9
Chapter 1. Spies, sensitive issues and a secret pact 13
Chapter 2. The poll tax blot and ‘Asian Angst’ 29
Chapter 3. Free trade’s flames hit our shores 41
Chapter 4. The heat of the dragon’s breath 59
Chapter 5. The rise and rise of Xi Jinping 75
Chapter 6. Life inside the Great Firewall 91
Chapter 7. The face of our China debate 107
Chapter 8. Academic freedom under pressure 125
Chapter 9. News or propaganda? 143
Chapter 10. Political carrots and sticks 159
Chapter 11. The Huawei furore 175
Chapter 12. Diplomacy or fence sitting? 191
Chapter 13. Treasures and traps on the Belt and Road 205
Chapter 14. ‘Show no mercy’: Human rights abuses 221
Chapter 15. War on our doorstep? 237
Chapter 16. The tightrope ahead 251
Acknowledgements 267
Interviewees 269
Endnotes 271
About the author 303
Introduction
T H E F I F T I E TH ANNIVE RSARY of diplomatic ties between two
countries would seem an occasion for grand celebrations. But
when New Zealand and China hit that milestone at the end of
2022, you could be forgiven for wondering whether either nation
even knew that was the case.
To mark the fortieth anniversary in 2012, the National
government signed a suite of agreements with the Chinese
leadership, covering everything from agriculture to aviation and
an anti-methamphetamine drive. It was all part of a new China
strategy from then prime minister Sir John Key to link the two
countries more closely together, from trade and the economy to
political and diplomatic ties. Speaking at a symposium to mark
the anniversary that year, Key was excited about the future: ‘I
am confident that, with all of your support, we will continue to
see New Zealand’s relationship with China go from strength to
strength over the coming years.’1
There was no such fanfare a decade on. With China’s borders
effectively closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, ministerial
visits were off the table, and new initiatives were thin on
the ground (apart from a minor upgrade to our free trade
agreement). When former prime minister Jacinda Ardern spoke
at that year’s China business summit in August there were still
words of warmth — but also a fair degree of trepidation about
what Ardern diplomatically described as an ‘evolving and
multifaceted relationship’. ‘Our differences need not define us,’

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the prime minister said, ‘but we cannot ignore them. This will
mean continuing to speak out on some issues — sometimes with
others and sometimes alone.’2
There has been plenty for New Zealand to speak out about:
from China’s mistreatment of Uyghur Muslims in the country’s
Xinjiang province and its draconian national security law in Hong
Kong, to its attempts at economic coercion of smaller countries
and power plays in the Pacific. Under the leadership of Xi Jinping,
the country has stepped up its efforts to become an economic and
political superpower — not just in Asia but on the world stage.
Xi himself has accrued more power than any other Chinese
leader in decades, changing the country’s constitution to embed
his own thoughts and breaking with precedent to lead both China
and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) for a third term — and,
some fear, potentially for life.
Those concerns have sparked tensions between China and the
United States that have been compared — with some justification
— to the Cold War rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union.
Great power competition does not only affect those going toe
to toe, either. As an old African proverb has it: ‘When elephants
fight, it is the grass that suffers.’
New Zealand is in a unique position when it comes to
the smaller nations trying to avoid being trampled: the first
Western country ever to sign a free trade deal with China, while
also remaining firmly embedded in the Five Eyes intelligence
alliance, a symbol of the American-led security order.
In the eyes of some, such as University of Canterbury
academic and China expert Anne-Marie Brady, New Zealand
has also been at the sharp end of Beijing’s efforts to interfere in
the political and economic systems of other countries. Brady
has described New Zealand as ‘the canary in the coal mine’ for

10
 I ntroduction

other small states trying to defend themselves against the Asian

superpower without facing punishment.3
So how is our defence going? It can be surprisingly difficult to
get a clear idea. Some former Kiwi diplomats and politicians see
the current debate as a ‘red scare’ of sorts, an overreaction that is
as much about America’s decline as China’s rise. Others accuse
New Zealand of timidity when it comes to criticising Beijing’s
overreach, too afraid of losing money to see the damage being
done in our country and abroad.
That’s if people will speak to you at all about the relationship.
Several prospective interviewees I approached declined to com-
ment for this book for fear of saying something wrong, while
others would speak only with the protection of anonymity. My
emails to the Chinese embassy in New Zealand went unanswered,
and Ardern’s office declined to make the prime minister available
for interview before her resignation at the start of 2023.
But those who did speak to me — a diverse range of politicians,
academics, diplomats, members of the Chinese community and
others with an interest in the relationship — believe we need to
be talking more, not less, about China’s rise and what it means
for our nation and the world.
At points, it feels like we are walking a tightrope: keeping
Beijing on side without alienating our friends in Washington,
benefiting from our business links without becoming overly
reliant, sharing our concerns over its behaviour without
scapegoating the country or Chinese New Zealanders.
This book is an attempt to explain the forces causing New
Zealand to wobble from one side to the other, and how we can
best keep our balance in the years to come.
As the safety net feels increasingly far away, it’s a walk we will
need to master.

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T H E C H I N A T IGH TROPE

Author’s note
Currency references throughout this book are in New Zealand
dollars unless otherwise specified.

12
Chapter 1
Spies, sensitive
issues and a
secret pact

E X AC T LY WH Y NE W Zealand’s two largest political parties

secretly agreed to push their Chinese-born MPs out of Parliament,
we may never know. Were National’s Jian Yang and Labour’s
Raymond Huo foreign agents, victims of racist scaremongering
— or something else altogether?
Fittingly for any discussion about China’s relationship with
New Zealand, uncertainty and whispers abound.
What is clear, however, is that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern
and opposition leader Todd Muller stepped away from the heat
of the 2020 election campaign to consider evidence from the
country’s shadowy intelligence agencies about a possible threat
within each of their parties. Whatever was said, they found it
compelling enough to put aside partisan politics and act — a
decision that speaks volumes.
Yang and Huo had each quietly served in Parliament for the

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best part of a decade, with solid rather than spectacular careers.

Neither had secured the baubles of ministerial office or even a
senior position within their own party, instead largely staying
out of the spotlight. Their departures were similarly low key.
Muller announced Yang’s retirement on 10 July — just days
before stepping down himself as leader after a turbulent 53 days
at the top — and less than a fortnight later, Huo revealed that he
was leaving to spend more time with his family.
With National beset with internal dysfunction, and Labour
soaring high on the back of the government’s response to the
Covid-19 pandemic, most New Zealanders had no real reason to
notice the retirements of two little-known politicians.
That changed less than a year later, when in May 2021 veteran
New Zealand journalist Richard Harman dropped a bombshell
on his Politik website: the timing of the retirements was far from
coincidental, and followed intelligence briefings given to both
parties outlining ‘security concerns about their relationship
with the Chinese Government’.1
Specifics were sparse, and even now those with knowledge of
what transpired are exceedingly reluctant to speak about it, but
from my own conversations it is clear that Harman was correct.
The intervention of Kiwi spies to effectively shepherd
incumbent MPs out of office had come as a shock to journalists
and other political observers, but concerns about Yang and Huo
had been in the public arena years before their leaders were
pushed to act.

When Jian Yang was selected to run for National at the 2011
election, party president Peter Goodfellow focused on the

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 Spies , sensitive issues and a se cret pact

candidate’s time in academia.

Yang moved to New Zealand in 1999 to work at the University
of Auckland, eventually rising to head up the university’s China
Studies Centre.
Delivering his maiden speech to Parliament in 2012 after
Sir John Key’s National government cruised to a second term
in power, Yang spoke of how a scholarship offer from Johns
Hopkins University in 1989 had been derailed after ‘student
demonstrations swept China’ and led to the Chinese government
changing its policies for overseas study.2 Left unmentioned
was the Tiananmen Square massacre of that same year, when
hundreds if not thousands of innocent students and bystanders
were killed in a brutal state crackdown.
But it was his studies within China that had attracted the
attention of New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service, as
Newsroom revealed in 2017.3 Before his postgraduate work
in Australia, Yang had studied and taught at the Air Force
Engineering College in Xi’an before completing a master’s
degree at the Luoyang Foreign Languages Institute in Henan —
both institutes run by China’s military forces at least in part to
train spies.
Such a background, former CIA analyst Peter Mattis told
Newsroom, suggested a person who would ‘almost certainly have
been an officer in China’s PLA [People’s Liberation Army] and
member of the Communist Party’.
In her ground-breaking 2017 research outlining the CCP’s
foreign influence efforts, New Zealand academic Anne-Marie
Brady said no one with Yang’s military intelligence background
would have been allowed to study overseas without PLA sanction.
‘Even if he had left the PLA, he would have had to wait at least
two years before he would be allowed to go abroad and he would

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have had to have official permission from his former employer

to obtain a Chinese passport,’ Brady wrote in her Magic Weapons
paper.4
Confronted by veteran journalist and Newsroom co-editor
Mark Jennings in an Auckland parking building, Yang denied
hiding anything and pleaded for Jennings to talk to his ‘boss’,
Prime Minister Bill English. A written statement he later released
was more forceful, decrying ‘a smear campaign by nameless
people who are out to damage me and the National Party 10 days
from an election, just because I am Chinese’.5
That moral high ground started to give way just a day later,
thanks to an extraordinary press conference at one of the
National Party’s Auckland offices. Flanked by a number of his
fellow MPs, including Jami-Lee Ross — whose own connections
with the Chinese community would cause the party further
headaches in the years to come — Yang denied having ever been
a spy or trained as an intelligence officer, but confirmed he was
once a ‘civilian’ officer in the PLA.6 Yes, he had failed to include
his time at military universities in the biography on his National
Party website, but only because ‘things can be more complicated
if people don’t understand the background’.
While insisting he had been upfront to National about his
background, Yang admitted he had failed to disclose the names
of the military institutions on his New Zealand visa application.
Instead, he listed the names of civilian ‘partner universities’, a
choice he insisted had been out of his hands due to the vagaries
of the Chinese system.
What did his lecturing at those universities consist of?
Teaching English to students who then went on to monitor the
communications of others, he replied. ‘If you define those cadets
or students as spies, yes, then I was teaching spies.’

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 Spies , sensitive issues and a se cret pact

With those remarks, the press conference was called to a

halt and the MP whisked away by his colleagues, unanswered
questions left hanging in the air.
Yet the furore dissipated almost as quickly as it had built up.
Bill English and the party hierarchy stood by their man, and
the public was absorbed by Ardern’s recent fairytale ascent to
the prime ministership. With National in opposition and Yang
languishing on the back benches there was less to be worried
about, a diplomat from one Western nation told me following
the election result.
The MP may not have made it to the Cabinet table under
English or John Key, but he had been a member of Parliament’s
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Committee, which is regularly
briefed on sensitive issues by diplomats and other officials. Yang
also accompanied several ministers — including Key — on trips
to Beijing due to his background, giving him privileged access to
government manoeuvrings on matters of national interest.
Key had left politics before his colleague’s ties became a matter
of public interest, but is adamant nothing untoward took place.
‘I’m not going to detail what advice I got or what discussions
I had, because I simply can’t. What I would say is that if I had
had genuinely held concerns about his intentions or his loyalties
. . . I would have taken immediate and direct steps to resolve that
issue,’ he says now.
‘The fact I didn’t tells you what I thought.’
Key was even more forceful in a 2021 interview for RNZ’s Red
Line podcast on Chinese influence, telling Guyon Espiner that if
Yang was a spy ‘he is the least inquisitive spy I’ve met’.
‘It wasn’t obvious to me he was pumping me for information
or wanting to get access to something else.’7
The idea that any half-decent spy would let themselves

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be caught rifling through desk drawers and rubbish bins is

a curious one, to say the least, but then Key has increasingly
found himself an outlier when it comes to all things Beijing, as
will be discussed later.
Some of Yang’s colleagues were at least willing to joke about
his connections to the Chinese state, as one former National
staffer recalls.
‘You’d go to a National Party function and there would be
“the spy” with Peter Goodfellow. Other people would go, “Peter’s
talking to the spy.” That was his nickname . . . years before [the
Newsroom story] that was always his nickname, the spy.’
Even after National fell out of power, Yang’s connections
within China were being put to use by the party in questionable
ways. In 2019 opposition leader Simon Bridges made a five-day
visit to the country, largely organised by Yang, where he met
Guo Shengkun, a member of the CCP’s 25-man Politburo which
oversees every major political decision.8 Guo also served as
party secretary of the Political and Legal Affairs Commission of
the Central Committee. The role put him in charge of China’s
sweeping security and intelligence network at a time when it
was ramping up its surveillance of minorities, including Uyghur
Muslims in Xinjiang province.9
That meeting, coupled with Bridges’ glowing praise of the
CCP’s ‘amazing story’ in an interview with state-owned news
channel CGTN, raised eyebrows in New Zealand. How did Yang
manage to get a lowly opposition leader from a country of 5
million people facetime with a man overseeing the justice system
of a billion-strong nation?
But with the MP largely dodging any English-language
interviews, and most coverage of National focusing on its struggles
in opposition, the pressure on Yang to answer questions ebbed away.

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 Spies , sensitive issues and a se cret pact

That merely left the stage clear for a Chinese parliamentarian

across the aisle with a spotty record of his own.

While Yang could be described as shying away from the spotlight

during his time in Parliament, Labour’s Raymond Huo was less
of a shrinking violet.
After moving to New Zealand as a 30-year-old in 1994, Huo
turned his hand to journalism as the New Zealand Herald’s Asian
affairs reporter. At points, he took on the New Zealand psyche:
writing about a marriage-for-residency scam, Huo said Kiwis
were seen by Asian immigrants as ‘generally kind and caring, but
also stupid and gullible’.10
Citing ‘one source close to Chinese diplomats’, he suggested that
gullibility affected New Zealanders’ responses to claims for refugee
status made by supposed victims of the Chinese government.
‘Other would-be immigrants claim to be repressed Falun
Gong followers or victims of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
And, said the source, stupid New Zealanders would believe them
and give them what they wanted. New Zealand has, thus, become
a dumping ground.’
Falun Gong and Tiananmen Square are both extremely
sensitive topics for Chinese authorities: the CCP has waged war
against the religious movement for decades, and information
about the 1989 state massacre of protesting students in Beijing’s
city square remains strictly censored.
But Huo had grander ambitions than merely transcribing the
views of those in the political world. Having earned a law degree
while working as a journalist, he spent time at Auckland law
firms before running for the Labour Party at the 2008 election.

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T H E C H I N A T IGH TROPE

The tide may have been going out on Helen Clark’s incumbent
government, but Huo was seen as part of a new generation of
Labour talent, earning special mention — alongside Jacinda
Ardern — from party president Mike Williams.11
In his maiden speech to Parliament, Huo spoke of his
father’s persecution during the Cultural Revolution: during
Mao Zedong’s crackdown on intellectuals he was forced to stand
outside the entrance to the hospital where he worked as a doctor
with a whiteboard declaring himself a ‘counter-revolutionary
medical expert’.12
Yet if the Labour MP was willing to point out some of
China’s historical ills, he was willing to echo the CCP line
on contemporary issues. When Green Party co-leader Russel
Norman staged a pro-Tibet protest during Xi Jinping’s 2010 visit
to New Zealand as Chinese vice-president, Huo dusted off his
typewriter to offer a riposte.
When Norman called for freedom for Tibet, Huo wrote, did
he ‘mean to say free Tibet from the Dalai Lama?’.13 China had
ended Tibet’s ‘notoriously cruel system of serfdom’, he added,
mentioning an Auckland exhibition displaying Tibetan worship
instruments made of body parts.
Huo’s attack earned condemnation from several colleagues
and forced a spokesman for party leader Phil Goff to note sharply
that ‘Raymond’s comments are clearly not Labour policy’. If
Huo ever offered an apology there is no record of it: indeed,
he appeared unrepentant before his boss weighed in, saying he
had done ‘no more than call for people to listen to both sides of
the story’.14
In Magic Weapons, Brady suggested it was Huo even more
than Yang who had been publicly promoting the Chinese
government’s views, through work with organisations tied to

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 Spies , sensitive issues and a se cret pact

the CCP’s foreign influence efforts such as the Zhi Gong Party.
Given the task of adapting Labour’s 2017 campaign slogan (‘Let’s
do this’) to a Chinese-language audience, Huo turned to a quote
from Xi Jinping: ‘Juǎn qǐ xiùzi nǔlì gōngzuò’, or ‘Roll up your
sleeves and work hard’.
There was just one problem, Brady said: beyond the propriety
or otherwise of using a Chinese government slogan, the phrase
had connotations of masturbation, with a government official in
Inner Mongolia suspended after mocking Xi for the innuendo.15
Huo gave Brady’s paper short shrift in the wake of its
publication, telling the New Zealand Herald there was ‘a fine line
between what she has alleged and the genuine promotion of the
New Zealand–China relationship’.16
A parliamentary committee inquiry into foreign interference
in elections in 2019 brought their conflict back to the surface.
Brady was at first blocked from appearing before the Justice
Select Committee after Huo, as its chair, and other Labour
members voted against allowing her submission, which had
been received after the deadline.17
While Huo said the decision was purely procedural, National
MPs cried foul and called on Ardern to intervene. The committee
reversed its decision and extended the submissions period, but
questions remained about whether it was right for the MP to
oversee the committee’s work given his Magic Weapons cameo.
Eventually Huo decided to recuse himself from the committee
for this inquiry, although not without taking a shot at National
MP Nick Smith, who had brought the Brady matter into the
public domain.
‘My challenge to him [Smith] is that should I not be a
Chinese-born MP who happens to chair the Justice Committee
would he be successful in setting the theme, which is an easy

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story to regurgitate?’, Huo told Newsroom.18

Misgivings about the Labour politician’s approach to China
issues extended beyond the corridors of Parliament. Duncan
Campbell, a respected New Zealand sinologist, remembers
explaining to Huo how people could conclude, rightly or wrongly,
that he had divided loyalties.
‘I made this point that the minute you start arguing that
you are a representative of the community, rather than a
representative of electors of this country, then you put yourself
in this impossible position where either you are working for
someone else, or you are suspected of working for someone else,’
Campbell says.
Huo hardly helped himself when, during a 2021 speech after
leaving Parliament, he accused Western countries of ‘being led
along by a kind of new ideological Cold War, and using a “white
terror” to oppress China and Chinese overseas’. ‘No matter
whether ethnic Chinese or Chinese citizens in foreign lands,
when we live overseas we must be upright, proud people of
China!’, he added, providing ballast to those who would call his
allegiances into question.19

The idea of ‘Chineseness’ extending beyond borders is an old

concept given new life under the current CCP regime, says Alex
Joske, an Australian analyst banned from visiting China due to
his research on Beijing’s influence efforts.
‘They don’t just claim to be the rulers of mainland China,
but also Taiwan and Hong Kong and Macau, and they’re
increasingly overtly trying to position themselves as advocates
and representatives of greater Chinese people internationally,’

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