With more than $30bn of new spending, a mere $9m initiative in New Zealand’s latest budget might seem too trivial to mention.
Yet the New Zealand government’s recent decision to fund an investigation into the impact of foreign interference on ethnic communities is a small step towards tackling an outsized problem: how to deal with meddling from foreign states, our largest trading partner included.
China may not have been mentioned by name, but efforts by the superpower to exert influence are of growing concern to New Zealand politicians and policymakers.
Prime minister Chris Hipkins on Monday announced he will visit China later this month – the first visit by a New Zealand leader since 2019 – and concerns about foreign interference will add a further degree of difficulty to navigating what is already an increasingly fraught relationship.
The issue burst into the public arena in 2021, when media outlet Politik reported that the retirement of two ethnic Chinese MPs at the previous year’s election had come after New Zealand intelligence officials briefed party leaders on concerns over the relationship the men had with the Chinese government.
But broader concerns about China’s network of influence in New Zealand had been growing for some time. In 2017, an influential research paper by University of Canterbury professor Anne-Marie Brady outlined a campaign of soft power in New Zealand, raising particular concerns over political donations and company directorships offered to former ministers or their relatives.
The following year, a report released by Canada’s spy agency, the CSIS, warned that “New Zealand provides a vivid case study of China’s willingness to use economic ties to interfere with the political life of a partner country,” and argued that a campaign of Chinese influence was encroaching on every level of New Zealand political life. “An aggressive strategy has sought to influence political decision-making, pursue unfair advantages in trade and business, suppress criticism of China, facilitate espionage opportunities, and influence overseas Chinese communities,” it wrote. “Some of these activities endanger New Zealand’s national security directly, while others have a more long-term corrosive effect.”
Earlier this year, New Zealand’s spy agency said in its annual report that foreign spies were becoming “increasingly aggressive” and that it had identified “a number of individuals connected to a foreign state” who were assessed as “intelligence officers who are undertaking intelligence activity in New Zealand”. The report did not say which foreign power those officers were working for.
And in March, a senior public servant said he was suspended from his role at the Public Service Commission after the SIS alleged he had been passing information to the Chinese government. He denies that allegation.
Fears about foreign interference stem in large part from political donations.
The government proudly declared to have “banned” foreign donations in 2019, but entirely foreign-owned companies registered in New Zealand can still give as much money to political parties and candidates as they please.
It was precisely such a company, Chinese billionaire Lang Lin’s Inner Mongolia Rider Horse Industry Ltd, whose $150,000 donation to the National Party in 2017 was pointedly described by then-Labour prime minister Jacinda Ardern as against the spirit of the law.
High-profile prosecutions last year of several Chinese community figures in relation to allegedly illegal donations to both National and Labour caused further hand wringing about the need for stricter rules. Three men were convicted over the National donations but are reportedly appealing against the verdict, while there were no convictions in relation to the Labour case.
An independent panel has this month recommended a major overhaul of New Zealand’s donations system, including a requirement that only registered voters be allowed to give money. However, such changes will not come into effect until at least the 2026 election – if at all.
Then there is the lack of oversight of foreign-language media, despite Chinese-language outlets having been caught out editing translated articles to cast the Chinese government in a better light.
Without sufficient checks and balances to ensure that Chinese communities are receiving unfiltered information about matters of public interest, the integrity of our electoral process may be put at risk.
Such concerns need to be put in the context of a wider shift in China-New Zealand relations, which hit their 50th anniversary last year.
For a long time, the two countries prided themselves on their history of firsts: New Zealand was the first western country to support China’s membership of the World Trade Organization, the first to designate it as a market economy, and the first to sign a free trade deal with the rising superpower.
The landscape is markedly different now: foreign affairs minister Nanaia Mahuta has spoken of moving “beyond a relationship of firsts” with China into more mature terrain, with concerns over human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong as well as efforts to build Chinese influence in the Pacific.
In responding to concerns about the risk of Chinese interference, New Zealand must be careful not to tip into unwarranted xenophobia – particularly in light of the Guardian revealing almost a third of all hate-motivated crimes in New Zealand since January 2022 were directed at Asian people.
Still, it is optimistic to expect such topics will be raised by Hipkins during his time in China. Instead, the prime minister will almost certainly focus on the relationship’s economic benefits, even if those bring their own problems given New Zealand’s high trade dependence on a single nation that has shown a willingness to use trade measures as political weapons.
Our intelligence officials and other public servants are undoubtedly working in the shadows to prevent interference from China and other states – but a little more sunlight would be no bad thing.
Sam Sachdeva is New Zealand news site the Newsroom’s national affairs editor and author of The China Tightrope, a newly released book about the changing China-New Zealand relationship.
