New Zealand lawmaker’s China ties raise alarms

WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND — Revelations that a New Zealand lawmaker had been a member of the Communist Party in China and taught English to spies there have raised alarms about Beijing’s influence in New Zealand

and how well the polit— ical parties there vet their candidates.

Jian Yang, a lawmaker with the center-right National Party, did not declare his past Communist Party affiliation or his work teaching spies in China on his New Zealand citizenship application. He was returned to Parliament for a third term in the coun- try’s Sept. 23 elections.

Days before the election, as some New Zealanders were casting advance ballots, Yang’s background was exposed in a joint investiga- tion by The Financial Times and the New Zealand online media outlet Newsroom.

While New Zealand is a small country, it is a member of the “Five Eyes” intel- ligence-sharing partnership along with the United States, Britain, Canada and Austra- lia. And so vulnerabilities in New Zealand’s government could have wider import.

Yang admitted that in the 1980s and early ‘90s, before emigrating to Australia and then moving to New Zea- land to teach at a univer- sity, he studied and taught at two Chinese educational institutions run by the People’s Liberation Army, China’s armed forces.

He said he had not named the Chinese military institu- tions on his application for New Zealand citizenship, and had instead listed “partner institutions” as his employers, because that was what the Chinese “system” had told him to do.

Yang conceded that he had taught English to spies, but said he had never been a spy himself, was no lon- ger a member of the Communist Party, and had been contracted and paid only as a civilian officer.

Yang has not been officially investigated in New Zealand or charged with espionage.

But Nicholas Eftimiades, a former officer with the CIA with extensive experience in China matters, said the title of civilian officer was a fluid one in China.

Eftimiades, now a lecturer at Penn State Harrisburg in Pennsylvania, said officers moved seamlessly between military and civilian assign- ments to include Chinese army units and work in the defense industry, think tanks and universities.

“Whether in uniform or not, these personnel are still actively engaged in espionage,” said Eftimiades, who also worked with the Defense Intelligence Agency in the United States.

Several China experts said in interviews that it was not possible for people to will- ingly “leave” China’s Communist Party, as Yang said he did, unless they had been expelled from it. Yang has not denounced the party.

Rodney Jones, a New Zealand economist who lives in Beijing and who has worked in Asia for 30 years, said that an “unrepentant” former member of the Communist Party should not be eligible to be a New Zealand lawmaker.

He said Yang should resign from Parliament.

Jones said that New Zealand needed better represen- tation of its Chinese popula- tion in Parliament, but that Yang’s ascension showed that New Zealand had become a “tributary state” of China.

The leadership of both major political parties in New Zealand said they were not concerned by the revelations.

Bill English, the incum- bent prime minister whose party Yang belongs to, said through a spokesman that he did not “see any obvi- ous signs of anything inap- propriate” and would not be interviewed on the matter.

English said the National Party had been aware of Yang’s background, and Yang had made no attempt to hide it.

Jones criticized the prime minister’s lack of alarm, saying the disclosure warranted an investigation.

The revelation comes as both the National and Labour parties have come under scrutiny in a report on China’s influence on the New Zealand government by Anne-Marie Brady, a political-science professor at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury.

Brady said that since the ascension of President Xi Jinping, China’s government has mounted an aggressive campaign of using soft power to influence New Zealand’s politics, economy and society, including through campaign donations.

In her report, Brady said that this year “a Chinese diplomat favorably compared New Zealand-China relations to the level of closeness China had with Albania in the early 1960s.”

She said the Chinese-language media in New Zealand was subject to extreme censorship, and accused both Yang and Raymond Huo, an ethnic Chinese lawmaker from the center-left Labour Party, of being subject to influence by the Chinese Embassy and community organizations it used as front groups to push the country’s agenda.