Vulnerability a motivation for China's political influence campaigns - new book
Monday, 27 February 2023
In an excerpt adapted from his new book, Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to influence Asia and the World, which is published this week, Joshua Kurlantzick looks at Chinese influence campaigns in New Zealand.
New Zealand: The Canary
Over the past decade, China under Xi Jinping has shifted away from its previous, relatively hands-off approach to the internal politics and societies of other countries. (To be sure, Beijing had always intervened in some of its nearest neighbours, like Taiwan and Southeast Asia, but it had mostly avoided wielding extensive influence within most countries’ political systems, universities, and societies.) That has changed under Xi, who has overseen a massive expansion of efforts to wield power within other states - at least until the zero-Covid debacle and Beijing’s deteriorating global image put a damper on China’s influence efforts.
Some of the motivations for China’s expanded influence campaigns today are the seismic changes in Chinese domestic politics during the era of Xi Jinping, the growing appeal (until the past three years) of China’s developmental model among many countries’ domestic problems, and the simple fact that China is becoming a major global power – economically, strategically, and diplomatically - and wants to wield more influence within other countries and over global narratives.
But there has been another motivating factor: opportunity. Until recently, many leading liberal democracies were vulnerable to China’s tactics. And by the 2010s, China had greater resources to deploy on influence tactics that already had begun to show promise.
Having gained some experience with influence tactics in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asian states, Beijing began to adopt these strategies in a more widespread manner - and particularly in New Zealand and Australia. New Zealand was, at first, one of the softest targets among liberal democracies. It may have had defences against outright espionage and some cybersecurity defences, but it had free political systems, media systems, and university systems, with few controls on foreign interference. And unlike Singapore or Taiwan, Wellington had little historical memory of Chinese influence efforts, and few people – at least at first – trained to combat them.
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Beijing bolstered its influence strategies in Australia and New Zealand even as Canberra and Wellington struggled at first to focus on Beijing’s efforts, and remained distracted in part by their own domestic politics, which included in Australia, until recently, constant in-fighting within ruling parties.
Australia and New Zealand long have represented prosperity, progressive government, and strong democracies; they are usually ranked as far stronger democracies than the United States and most countries in Western Europe. The countries also are members of the Five Eyes group, one of the closest intelligence-sharing networks in the world.
Yet Australia, and particularly New Zealand, still had major blind spots to Chinese influence tactics. The political establishment – wary of alienating the biggest trading partner of a country far less resilient, trade-wise, than Australia, and potentially distracted by the sinecures many former top New Zealand politicians were receiving at Chinese companies – remained in wilful denial about China’s ability to covertly and coercively influence New Zealand’s politics.
With New Zealand distracted or essentially in denial about growing Chinese influence efforts, Beijing used sharp power - corrosive, hidden efforts at influence - to penetrate the country’s politics, academia, and society. As Anne-Marie Brady of Canterbury University in Christchurch noted in an extensive analysis, the government for years in the 2010s allowed Beijing to steadily gain power to shape New Zealand policymaking, largely through sharp-power influence. The CCP had, through the use of informants, financial support, and other types of supervision, thoroughly and mostly covertly penetrated many New Zealand ethnic Chinese organisations, and created pro-Beijing ethnic Chinese organisations to counterbalance those ethnic Chinese groups that remained less pro-Beijing.
Beijing also gained de facto control of most Chinese-language news outlets in the country, and Beijing’s representatives in New Zealand increasingly used local Chinese student associations to silence critical discussions about China on New Zealand campuses. Brady and other reports show that Chinese groups also have funnelled money into New Zealand politics, and the Chinese government has built multiple links to top New Zealand politicians and business leaders, in part by orchestrating cushy post-retirement sinecures for some of them at Chinese state firms. In addition, at least before Covid, Beijing stepped up people-to-people links between Chinese enterprises, many of them state-owned or with state connections, and New Zealand companies.
Beijing’s growing influence over Chinese-language outlets, Chinese community associations, and Chinese university groups in New Zealand allowed the Chinese government to utilise these actors as, essentially, agents of China’s foreign policy. Community leaders sympathetic to Beijing organised large numbers of pro-China events, particularly in Auckland, that attract the attention of politicians, and also arranged counterprotests against New Zealand organisations that held demonstrations when Chinese top officials visited the country.
While the ethnic Chinese community comprises a minority of New Zealand citizens, discourse within the community has broader effects on New Zealand policy – community leaders play a vital role in informing New Zealand politicians, and can shape broader New Zealand public opinion. Ethnic Chinese businesspeople and community leaders, including some Chinese nationals (not New Zealand citizens, which are totally legal in making donations) and China-based companies have in the past decade become sources of donations to and organising efforts for both of New Zealand’s major political parties. As prominent politicians from the National Party increasingly echoed Beijing’s policy positions in the 2010s, some National Party leaders accepted questionable donations.
Meanwhile, some New Zealand politicians with growing links to Chinese donors and Chinese firms parroted China’s view of its domestic and foreign policies to domestic and foreign media. Some New Zealand companies with close commercial ties to Chinese firms, and New Zealand business leaders who have later taken jobs at prominent Chinese companies, also served as mouthpieces for Beijing’s policy perspectives, echoing China’s views on Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and many other issues. This is a boon for China; prominent politicians and business leaders from New Zealand were delivering China’s preferred messages, and New Zealand citizens were much more likely to give these messages a sympathetic listening coming from a New Zealand political leader.
New Zealand's vetting, until recently, remained quite weak. One prominent New Zealand member of parliament, Jian Yang, allegedly had ties to Chinese military intelligence before emigrating to New Zealand and becoming a citizen in 2004; he also taught in China at a prominent school known for preparing Chinese intelligence members. Yang at one point said he had been a member of the CCP in the past, but was not a member any longer. (Yang had hidden these details from any public profile in English.)
Between 2014 and 2016, Yang sat on the parliamentary select committee for foreign affairs, defence and trade, which played a major role in New Zealand’s China policy. As a member of parliament, he did not need security clearance to view sensitive and classified information, including information related to China. With his background, if he had applied for a job in the New Zealand government instead of running for parliament, he almost surely would have been denied a security clearance, according to New Zealand security analysts. Yet Yang seemingly played a major role in shaping New Zealand’s China policy when the National Party was in power, as Wellington became increasingly unwilling to challenge China on issues ranging from rights abuses to its tough approach to the South China Sea.
Yang also personally accompanied National Party prime ministers in meetings with senior Chinese leaders. He seemed to involve other top New Zealand politicians in questionable meetings with Chinese officials, where they too parroted China’s views on a wide range of issues. Yang organised a 2019 trip to China by National Party leader Simon Bridges, apparently with little consultation with New Zealand officials focused on China. On the trip, Bridges met with China’s former domestic public security chief – in other words, meeting the head of the secret police – lavished somewhat sycophantic praise on the CCP during an interview in Chinese state media, and also essentially avoided even offering the mildest questions about Beijing’s crackdown in Hong Kong.
New Zealand offered up little defence at first to China’s influence operations in the 2010s. Beyond Brady’s academic exposure of Chinese sharp power in New Zealand, foreign intelligence officials warned Wellington as well. In 2018, as Brady noted, Canada’s national intelligence service produced a lengthy report on the implications of China’s global rise and influence activities. The document cited New Zealand as a textbook example of China’s aggressive influence strategies, declaring that China saw the country “as a soft underbelly through which to access Five Eyes intelligence”. Perhaps most alarmingly, the Canadians concluded that “the PRC has not had to pressure New Zealand… successive New Zealand governments have actively courted it.”
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Yet Wellington’s guard remained down for a long time, which Chinese officials could not help but recognise. After Brady and some New Zealand investigative reporters exposed the extent of Chinese influence in the country’s media and information market and politics, the revelations detonated like a bomb among a small circle of political and defence elites. In conversations with some New Zealand security specialists after these revelations, I found that they regularly discussed the country's vulnerabilities. But for years, senior politicians from both major parties in Wellington seemed uninterested in self-scrutiny, determined not to dig too deeply into stories of Chinese influence.
For most of the 2010s, and even after the National Party lost to the Labour Party in 2017, top New Zealand politicians avoided looking too hard at Beijing’s influence activities. When New Zealand Prime Minister and then-Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern, first elected in 2017, faced questions about the challenge of Chinese influence, she for years remained uncharacteristically dismissive and bland for a leader known for bold stances on many other issues. The New Zealand parliamentary committee tasked with investigating foreign influence initially refused to meet with Brady, the country’s leading expert on China’s sharp-power tactics.
Finally, in recent years, amidst substantial pressure from allies and some New Zealanders concerned about Wellington’s vulnerability, and amidst obvious, growing authoritarianism in China, Wellington applied a greater degree of scrutiny to China’s activities within New Zealand. Rebecca Kitteridge, director of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service, the main national intelligence agency,told a parliamentary inquiry into foreign influence activities that the intelligence agency had “seen activities by state actors that concern us” and that “motivated state actors are adept at finding weaknesses or grey areas to help them to covertly build and project influence”. In a confidential cable that I obtained that had been written from the British High Commission in Canberra, diplomats in the UK’s embassy in Australia noted that there was a growing “sense of vulnerability to [Chinese] sharp power” both in Australia and in New Zealand.
The Ardern administration did take a tougher line in recent years. It banned large foreign donations in its political system. Although Wellington clearly stated that this ban was done after thorough analysis and singled out no country in particular, China was the most obvious major foreign donor. New Zealand also began to scrutinise other Chinese influence tactics more closely, and to investigate the details of many political donations. The country’s Serious Fraud Office reportedly began to investigate donations to both the National Party and the Labour Party following allegations of improper donations to the National Party from a Chinese businessman, Zhang Yikun. New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service reportedly began analysing Jian Yang, and he eventually decided not to stand for re-election in national elections held in 2020 and dominated by Labour; the security services also investigated a Labour MP, Raymond Huo, for having ties to Chinese intelligence.
Leaders of all of New Zealand’s political parties also began to step up pressure on members to assess links to China. Still, even with these reforms the foreign influence law contained loopholes, like allowing foreign-owned companies registered in New Zealand to make political donations; the government plans to make political donations more transparent. Wellington still often seems reluctant to delve too deeply into Chinese state activities related to the diaspora community, universities, and other important levers of influence.
And overall, according to several New Zealand security experts, there remains a great reluctance among some senior New Zealand policymakers to publicly criticise and harshly scrutinise the influence efforts of such an important trading partner. To be sure, the Ardern administration has become much more critical of China’s rights abuses, including in places like Hong Kong and Xinjiang, in recent years, joining other countries’ statements about Beijing’s abuses. But without the same ability as Australia to stand up to China, with a small cadre of China experts, New Zealand still must walk a much finer path. And if the National Party comes back to power, Wellington could go back to denying Beijing's influence tactics. As John Key recently told The Economist, he does not see China “as the aggressor that everybody else sees'.
Joshua Kurlantzick is Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia at American think-tank the Council on Foreign Relations. Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to influence Asia and the World is published on March 1.