China’s Spectre: Sinophobia, Military Escalation, And Our Relationship
There is a spectre haunting New Zealand media: China. Since the late 2010s, there's been an ever-increasing focus on and bias towards the Chinese government with dredged up allegations of spying, breathless reporting on China's activities in the Pacific, and repeated calls to "turn away from China" from think tank talking heads and war hawks. Earlier this year, Stuff released their long-in-gestation “China expose” documentary, an alleged expose of Chinese foreign influence in China, based primarily on speculation and hearsay from members of the expat community, and stern warnings about Chinese “aggression” from then-Defence and Intelligence Minister Andrew Little. Never mind that the US started leaking intelligence to foreign news outlets in 2019 as part of an anti-China propaganda blitz, though. In August last year, the NZSIS published a rare public “threat assessment” report, naming China, Russia and Iran as the top 3 threats to New Zealand security.
And our state broadcaster isn’t letting up either, as last month, Guyon Espiner gave 30 minutes of his show 30 to an interview with Peter Zeihan, talking the US election, geopolitics and especially China and New Zealand’s relationship. Zeihan’s previous resume includes the US State Department, assorted DC think tanks, and time as the vice-president of private intelligence company Stratfor. He's now director of the aptly-named Zeihan on Geopolitics, a consulting firm whose clientele includes energy companies, financial institutions, agribusiness, universities, business associations and the US military. That’s in between writing airport books and running a YouTube channel. He spends a lot of the interview lambasting the Chinese state, arguing the country is on the brink of collapse within 10 years, saying they used "unfair" practices to build up the world's largest industrial base for manufacturing, and New Zealand's attempt to keep relations with both China and the US will be futile. He directly compares our foreign policy with China as "very, very similar to what the Germans had towards the Russians” just before the Ukrainian War, and it doesn't serve our "economic, cultural or strategic interests" to be aligned with them. His credibility rings a little hollow when you find out he’s been making the same collapse prediction since 2010. So disregarding a “China watcher” who serves as a mouthpiece for the US state, what is New Zealand’s relationship to China? In reality, it’s one of the longest sustained relationships New Zealand has had with another nation, comparable only to neighbours in the Pacific like Australia, or overlord Britain. From the founding of New Zealand to now, our two countries have been linked over those years by consistent contact and connection, one that has only strengthened in recent years.
Early beginnings
In 1842, Wong Ahpoo Hock Ting, the first recorded Chinese emigre to Aotearoa, stepped foot in Nelson. Wong left China at the age of 9, having spent the past 12 years working as a cabin-boy and steward on British ships. He deserted his post and spent 30 days in jail, before being released and starting a new life in the South Island. He was widely regarded as literate, hardworking and sharp, serving as a housekeeper, then farmer, before applying for citizenship to be able to purchase land. As an alien he would have been ineligible under normal circumstances, but the colonial secretary for the South Island at the time wrote endorsing an exemption for Wong, which was granted. He anglicised his name to Appo Hocton, and settled down on a section of land he purchased in Washington Valley, building 8 houses, 4 of which still stand today. He married twice, before moving up near Motueka and passing away in 1920.
However, Hocton’s story was an outlier compared to many of those who would come later. China, and Chinese people, have often been a mythical and often frightening Other to many Pākehā, targeted more so than other minorities and even Asian ethnicities. Edward Wakefield, after success in spurring European migration through his New Zealand Company, planned to import Chinese labour in the 1850s to serve in menial labour roles like servants, mechanics and shepherds. The scheme was scuttled after detractors labelled the plan a conspiracy to flood the colony with “ignorant, slavish, and treacherous” slaves. Following the discovery of gold in the South Island in 1860, waves of Chinese miners escaping the collapsing Qing dynasty arrived in Southland and Otago, but too late to capitalise on the peak of the rush. By the 1870s, around 4,200 Chinese miners had arrived, with only some prospect of consistent income from gold. They were often unable to integrate into wider New Zealand society, living in separate settlements dotted throughout Otago and the West Coast, and after the gold rushes couldn’t find much work apart from menial jobs like market gardening, shopkeeping and laundromat operating. Like America and other Western countries these early emigres were subject to deep prejudice and racism, viewed as a blight invading New Zealand. The same myths about Oriental subversion and corruption sprouted, and migrants were often subjected to horrid conditions and discrimination from the government and society at large. The Tuapeka Times in March 1885 printed this about Chinese miners in Otago:
“For the past week, Arrowtown has been the centre of attraction for about 200 Chinese, who have made night hideous with their exploding crackers, and their disgusting presence felt in more ways than one. On Sunday night last, even Europeans, and, we believe females at that were to be seen playing 'fan-tan', while every night for a week, the Chinese stores have been scenes of indescribable vice and repulsive practices. The opium pipe, we hear, has been freely dispensed, even to little boys. Several people were seen under the influence of brandy, and altogether the Chinese Camp has been the sink of iniquity for days and nights past. It seems strange that Europeans should so far forget themselves as to mingle freely with almond eyed, leprosy tainted filthy Chinamen, but the fact is disgusting and lamentable as it may appear.”
In 1881, following similar laws in California and Australia, the government instituted a £10 poll tax per Chinese migrant brought into the country and one migrant per 10 tons of cargo, later increased to £100 and 200 tons. The poll tax was the first in a line of discriminatory policies against Chinese and Asian migrants, including English literacy tests used to bar specific non-English speakers, and denial of citizenship and pensions from 1908 to 1952. It wasn’t until 1987 that New Zealand’s explicit preference for British migrants was taken off the books. In 1905, British emigre Lionel Terry arrived in Northland before travelling to Wellington, distributing his anti-Chinese and white supremacist manifesto along the way. He tried to approach Parliament about his ideas for immigration policies, but after being rebuffed, travelled to what used to be Wellington’s Chinatown and shot Joe Kum Yung, a Chinese man who had lived in New Zealand for the past 25 years. He handed himself into the police the next day, saying he was attempting to bring attention to the problem of Asian migration into the country. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and sentenced to psychiatric detention. Terry was often visited by other white supremacists up until his death in 1952. In 1903, the Qing dynasty established the first Chinese consulate in Wellington, which later became the Republic of China’s in 1912 as the only point of diplomatic contact between the two countries. Sympathies towards Chinese immigrants softened following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, and further waves of migrants arrived after the poll tax ceased to be enforced after 1934.
Changing times in China
On the other hand, New Zealanders who began moving to China in the early 1900s had a markedly different experience. A few hundred had moved to China in the years leading up to the PRC’s founding, with many coming during the Chinese Civil War and Second Sino-Japanese War, carrying out a variety of roles like humanitarian workers, teachers, missionaries and workers. One of the most prominent of these figures, and dubbed one of “China’s Top 10 international friends”, was New Zealander Rewi Alley. Born in Canterbury to a teacher and leader of the suffragette movement in 1897, he was named after one of the leaders of the Kīngitanga resistance during the Waikato invasion. He served on the Western Front in WWI, before returning to New Zealand to farm. After selling out his stake of the farm, he moved to Shanghai in 1927 to start a new life. Alley was largely apolitical when he arrived, but found himself setting foot into a tumultuous time for China. He arrived a week after the Shanghai Massacre, where KMT forces had executed thousands of CCP members and unionists in the streets, an event largely regarded as the start of the Chinese Civil War. Alley began working as a factory inspector, fire warden, and aid worker, which gave him an inside look into the conditions of Chinese society at the time. Alley said of his decision to become engaged in workers rights and organising,
" ... I was involved in the factories in Shanghai and I can remember seeing sacks in the alleys at the back of the factories. At first I thought they were sacks of rubbish, but they weren't, they were dead children. Children worked to death in the foreign-owned factories. Little bundles of humanity worked to death for someone's bloody profit. So I decided that I would work to help China. I suppose then it was like a marriage of sorts and I wrote what I wrote and said what I said out of loyalty to that marriage. I know China's faults and contradictions; there are plenty of those. But I wanted to work for this place and I still do. I woke up to some important things here and so I felt I owed China something for that."
After the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, he became one of the key organisers of the Chinese Industrial Cooperative Association. The CICA set up over 3000 workers’ cooperatives to maintain a manufacturing capacity devastated by bombings and waves of refugees. The phrase Alley chose for the cooperatives, "gung ho" (工合), was shorthand for “Chinese industrial cooperative” (工業合作社), but could also be translated as “work together”, a slogan meant to imbue a collectivised and worker-led spirit into the factories that soon dotted China. In 1942, US Marine Corps Major Evan Carlson picked up the phrase from his time in China and made it the motto of his battalion, with the phrase entering popular English soon after. When the PRC was established in 1949, foreigners across China were deported, including many New Zealanders, but Alley was one of the few allowed to stay. He continued to help set up various institutions, wrote 60 books and translated more to Mandarin, and counted key members of the CCP among his friends and acquaintances. When Mao met Muldoon in 1976 on one of the last state visits before he passed, Muldoon asked if there was anything he could do for Mao. "Give Alley his passport back", he replied.
From the smallest to the largest
In terms of formal diplomatic relations, while New Zealand recognised the Republic of China (Taiwan) over the People’s Republic following the end of the Civil War, and fought on opposing sides in the Korean War, relations were still maintained throughout the early Cold War. Even in the shadow of New Zealand’s post-WWII Red Scare, Alley in 1952 was able to help establish an unofficial point of contact between the two countries, the New Zealand China Friendship Society, still active today. Later the same decade, New Zealand was the first Western country to send a politician to the People’s Republic. Opposition Labour MP Warren Freer first visited in 1955, against the wishes of Labour leader Walter Nash, but pushed by National PM Sidney Holland. During a second visit in 1958, and as an MP in a Labour majority of one, it was discovered that Freer was at risk of going bankrupt and forfeiting his parliamentary seat. Labour Party members and donors managed to scrape together enough cash to pay off both his debts and fund the remainder of his trip to China, with Nash ordering MPs to contribute on the risk of them losing their jobs.
In 1957, the New Zealand China Friendship Society organised for 5 of the society’s members to visit China. Among those selected were filmmakers Rudall and Ramai Te Miha Hayward, who shot a documentary called “Inside Red China” during their travels, the first English-speaking film crew to visit the country. They tried distributing the film as the first largely unfettered record of life inside China at the time, but the film was labelled communist propaganda and never screened internationally. The Haywards were able to capture Ramai giving Chairman Mao a kahu huruhuru, or Māori feather cloak, gifted by Kingitanga leader King Korokī. Ramai later recounted the event,
“Mao greeted me, and then I put the cloak on his shoulders and tied it. I said it was a gift from our Maori king of Aotearoa New Zealand, a gift of goodwill to the leaders of China. I said “We are the smallest nation in the world, giving this gift to the largest nation in the world.” He smiled and said, reassuringly, ‘The smallest is as great as the largest.’”
In the same year, New Zealand photographer Brian Brake was one of three Western photojournalists let into the country for the first time, and was later the only Western photojournalist present for the 10th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China in 1959. Te Papa has 4,000 of his photos of China available on their online archive, providing a window into China during a nascent point in its development.
During the 1960 Sino-Soviet split, the Communist Party of New Zealand was the only Western communist party to side with the PRC over the USSR. While that decision caused predictable splintering, the CPNZ leader Victor Wilcox was still treated to state tours of China and personal meetings with Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai. The New Zealand and Australian University Student Associations organised joint visits to China in the 1960s, but visits were suspended in 1968 following Australian members of the tour making disparaging comments in the presence of CCP officials. Visits resumed in 1971, the same year China was admitted to the UN. A diplomatic wave of detente with China followed and, in 1972, after messages through the New Zealand China Friendship Society, New Zealand was the 6th country to be approved for a "ping pong diplomacy" tour.
A group of Chinese table tennis players and some foreign relations officials disguised as “managers” touched down at Auckland International Airport in Godzone on 16 July 1972. They played in four cities and put on a masterclass from a country with more table tennis players than there were New Zealanders at the time. The delegation was received at Parliament during their visit by members of the National government, led by Jack Marshall, and Labour MPs like opposition leader Norman Kirk. The Dominion Post described the reception as having “a distinctive Chinese flavour”, but the Chinese players “generally did not tuck into much of the food”. During private negotiations after the ceremony, Chinese representatives repeated a need for recognition of the legitimate Chinese state over Taiwan before relations went further. National officials baulked at the idea, having built up diplomatic goodwill with Taiwan over 2 decades, but the tour left open the possibility of warming relations. After their meeting at Parliament, the Chinese team was taken on a tour of former All Black Ken Gray’s farm, where they were shown a sheep shearing demonstration and rode horses around the property. Part of the official souvenir program, much of it aimed at a retrospective audience back home in China, included an ad for Lion Brown, loved by "appreciative consumers around the Pacific Basin". The Dominion Post later grumbled that the team “went off as fixedly Maoist as they arrived,” despite the “prevalence of lipstick and miniskirts.”
While the National government was hesitant in those first negotiations about cutting ties with Taiwan, the Kirk government recognised the PRC as the "sole legal state of China" two weeks after coming into office that same year. It took 20 years from Nixon's historic trip to China in 1972 until America made the same call. Kirk’s government told the RoC embassy to pack their bags, and embassies in both countries were established the next year. In early 1973, Labour Minister for Overseas Trade Joe Walding was the first New Zealand government minister to visit China, meeting Zhou Enlai, with Chinese Foreign Trade Minister Bai Xiangguo soon visiting Wellington in return. When Muldoon took power in 1975, he abandoned National’s previous “Two Chinas” policy and sought to strengthen relations that the Labour government before him had laid the foundations for. He was the first Prime Minister to visit China in early 1976 as mentioned earlier, meeting a largely senile Mao before conducting actual negotiations with party officials.
Early trade and formal diplomatic relations between China and New Zealand started off slowly. Primary industries began to make inroads into trade, and with the loosening of New Zealand immigration laws in 1987, skilled Chinese immigrants made up large numbers of new arrivals to the country. Chinese New Zealanders are now the largest non-Polynesian and non-European ethnic group in New Zealand, representing 5% of the population at ~280,000 people. In 1997, the two countries concluded a bilateral trade agreement, making New Zealand the first Western country to support Chinese inclusion in the WTO. In 2002, Helen Clark formally apologised for New Zealand’s historic treatment of Chinese people. New Zealand was the first developed country to sign a free trade agreement with China in 2008, with tariffs on 96% of New Zealand goods removed by 2019. Part of China's modern calculus, especially after the Dengist reforms, has been allowing Western countries to outsource their manufacturing capability in exchange for foreign currency and certain specialty imports. This has led to China becoming far and away New Zealand’s largest trading partner. New Zealand exported $20b to China in 2023, 20% of total exports, and over double the next closest country, America. China accounts for a huge portion of the economy, numbers that the US isn't likely to pick up in its current increasingly isolationist turn. Neither are traditional allies like the UK or Europe, as the current era of US-dominated globalisation wanes. With China having produced more industrial goods than any other country since 2010, it makes sense for New Zealand to maintain strong economic ties with one of its relatively closest and most populous neighbours. To turn away from a country that we’ve managed to forge increasingly close ties to, and hitch our horse to the slowly self-destructing American project, seems shockingly shortsighted.
A boiling Pacific
China is not a country without its issues, is not without self-interest, and is likely engaged in some level of espionage here. But if we were willing to start setting the bar there for halting relations with a country, you don't see the people talking about China making those same arguments about other countries. The US (and other Five Eyes countries) have a largely opaque spy base operating in New Zealand called the NZSIS and GCSB, and have been caught interfering in our politics for decades. The same week the NZSIS redeployed allegations of Chinese spying from 2015, the GCSB admitted they had run a NSA computer system involved in drone strike targeting for a decade and a half without telling anyone outside the agency. People, often with a vested interest in maintaining an American hegemony, who keep sounding the alarm about an aggressive China that needs to be contained, never seem to make the same argument for a country that carried out a war on terror that killed over 4.5 million and displaced up to 59 million people.
There is a suspicion placed on China as a country not to be trusted, with potential machinations for a New Beijing in the Liberated Wellington Harbour buried deep in a 20 year plan. The frenzy of anti-China reporting has only gotten more feverish as AUKUS is in the process of kickstarting the militarisation of the Pacific. While Labour only toyed with the idea of AUKUS, they spent much of their time in office slowly gravitating from our traditional "independent" foreign policy, to one much more at home among Western powers. Ardern aligned herself with the last gasps of centrist neoliberalism in figures like Trudeau and Macron, and attempted to gain more favour with the US. They also spent the back half of their second term sending Andrew Little to sign defence agreements with Pacific nations, and attempting to turn around an ageing and decaying NZDF.
Following decades of neglect since the end of the Cold War, New Zealand, Australia, the US and other Western countries are all trying to consolidate a tighter grasp over the Pacific. After rolling out the red carpet in Wellington for two-time coup leader and then-PM Sitiveni Rabuka, Little was able to sign a Status of Forces Agreement with Fiji in 2023, following New Zealand also announcing climate resilience funding. This was the first re-establishment of military relations since the 2006 coup, a significant warming towards a country still marred by institutional corruption and a military that often threatens to throw its weight around.
Australia just finished investing $100 million into the Fijian Black Rock Military Base near Nadi, beating out China for the contract. The base is ostensibly designed as a hub for disaster relief and peacekeeping in the region, but of course with the ability to be used militarily. According to Amnesty International, it was also the site often used by the post-2006 coup security forces to torture and kill civilians for almost a decade.
This is among security deals with the Solomon Islands, more training with Pacific nations, and deals the US and Australia have been signing. In August last year, Little unveiled documents from the Defence Policy Review which recommended investment in "a combat capable, ready force that protects New Zealand and our interests", strengthening ties with “our longstanding Five Eyes intelligence partners”, especially against China, and spending up to 2% of GDP on defense.
Now the coalition has placed Judith Collins, who once described Nazi Erwin "Desert Fox" Rommel as a personal hero, in charge of the portfolio. Talk of joining AUKUS is already back on the table, along with a major increase in our use and deployment of the NZDF. The Navy will be training alongside the IDF at RIMPAC in late June, the world's largest maritime warfare exercise run out of Hawaii by the US. Luxon recently announced we'll now be assisting Japan in monitoring and enforcing blockades and sanctions on North Korea, along with stationing more troops alongside the North-South Korean border.
Under the previous Labour government, and especially under this National coalition, we are also preparing for whatever conflict the US is trying to start with China that will most likely play out in the South China Sea and the Pacific. AUKUS is America's loud way of saying the showdown against China is happening on our doorstep, and we're beginning to step in line. Peters as Foreign Minister recently said he was "incredibly concerned" over Chinese presence in the Pacific, and did not want to see any developments that might "destabilise" the region’s security. Our media is supporting this escalation as well, providing the scaremongering and ideological priming to view China as an insurmountable enemy we must face off against.
And this rise in Sinophobia and anti-Asian sentiments are not without real world impacts. Not even a decade ago "foreign" (read: Chinese) homebuyers were the reason no one could buy a house, instead of the myriad of systems and rules that allow a landed gentry to play Monopoly with mouldy villas in Mt Eden. Despite New Zealand often adopting a multi-cultural facade, racism is an everyday reality in this country for many, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic fueling racism against Asian people. Out of 9,300 hate crimes reported between January 2022 to 2024, 41% targeted Asian and South Asian people. Last week in June, a 15 year old Chinese student was attacked by a woman yelling racial slurs on an Auckland bus, and was left with 3 broken teeth and facial injuries. The general ratcheting up of propaganda and stoking of fears about China is flowing down into wider society, and New Zealand risks seeing some of the much uglier outbursts of violence against Asians seen in places like the US.
One of the things that needs to be heeded the most in times like these is war with China is not a necessary inevitability, it’s a conflict being stoked by American interests not willing to concede to China any sort of way on the direction of the world. Fear of China is being cultivated by the media and political apparatuses to launder gradual support for a turn back towards an American empire that is slowly beginning to sink below the waves. For New Zealand to make this mistake of shrugging off China, with decades of relations and one of the strongest economic ties for a Western country, could prove to be one of the biggest mistakes we make as a country.
Smith K. Stead is a writer and research in Aotearoa