New Zealand Prime Minister Cancels Club Dinner Hosted by Pro-China Group

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins canceled his plans to attend a dinner party with a pro-China group last week. According to the New Zealand online news publication Newsroom, the dinner was hosted by the New Zealand Chinese Business Club (NZCBC) and presented by a major Chinese liquor brand. The NZCBC was founded by former Member of Parliament (MP) Yang Jian, who stepped down from office in 2020. Posters promoting the dinner showed Hipkins and MP Ginny Anderson as guest speakers and the Auckland Business Chamber as co-organizer. On May 3, four hours after receiving an inquiry from Newsroom, the prime minister’s office said Hipkins would not attend the event. He accepted the invitation assuming that the event was hosted by the Auckland Business Chamber. “He accepted on that basis but subsequently is unable to attend. We have informed the chamber,” the prime minister’s office replied. According to Newsroom, the Chinese Business Club includes the Australasia Cultural Education Trust, which is a leading disseminator for Beijing’s official mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, in New Zealand, and has a partnership with the Chinese Consulate in Auckland and the Chinese Embassy in the capital city of Wellington. Both the Australian and New Zealand governments are sensitive to the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) United Front activities. Canberra and Wellington see the importance of preventing Beijing from gaining commercial and political influence in other countries through overseas Chinese organizations and proxy groups. China’s United Front Work Department is an agency responsible for carrying out influence activities abroad. Yang, a former New Zealand National Party member, was exposed by the media in 2017 as a former lecturer at the CCP’s spy institute. He brought the party’s leader to China in 2019 to meet with Guo Shengkun, secretary of the CCP’s Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, and to be interviewed by the Chinese state media. On the eve of the 2020 New Zealand election, Yang and a pro-CCP MP in the Labor Party, Raymond Huo, announced their retirement from politics due to the intervention of the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS). The Newsroom article also reveals that Andrew Kirton, Hipkin’s chief of staff, was criticized by crown prosecutors from the New Zealand Serious Fraud Office when he appeared as a key witness in a 2022 Auckland High Court case concerning political donations made by a wealthy New Zealand Chinese businessman, Zhang Yikun. The case involved Zhang and two co-defendants who fraudulently donated to both of New Zealand’s major political parties, the National Party and the Labour Party. In the year following his retirement from politics, Yang founded the New Zealand Chinese Business Club. In March 2021, the club was officially launched by former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, and it has hosted many politicians, including former National Party leader Simon Bridges, who is now the CEO of the Auckland Business Chamber, and Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown, at its 2022 event. Janice Liu contributed to this report.