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“THE ZHAO LEJI VISIT: UNVEILING THE HIDDEN NETWORKS BETWEEN POLITICAL COERCION, ECONOMIC DEPENDENCY, AND MĀORI VULNERABILITY” - 21 November 2025

Hidden Connections: Cui Bono? Cui Malo?

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Ltn

21 Nov 2025 — 14 min read

In November 2025, the third-highest-ranking member of China’s communist government arrived in Aotearoa to conduct a careful diplomatic dance with New Zealand’s political establishment. Zhao Leji, chairman of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, held a bilateral meeting with Speaker Gerry Brownlee and met Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in Auckland, while an international consortium stood silently by, watching Aotearoa’s leaders treat trade relationships as more valuable than human rights.

But who is Zhao Leji, really? And what does his visit reveal about New Zealand’s relationship with a state apparatus documented as orchestrating systematic persecution?

Zhao ranks only below President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang in China’s pecking order, placing him among the most powerful figures on Earth. Yet this power, sources confirm, is inextricably linked to an infrastructure of coercion that New Zealand’s government has chosen to largely ignore.

Background: Mapping the Historical Context

Rewi Alley: The Māori Gateway to Communist China

Before examining Zhao’s 2025 visit, we must understand the historical template through which New Zealand approaches China. The visit deliberately leverages Rewi Alley, the Ngāti Maniapoto-named Canterbury activist who dedicated 60 years of his life to communist China and became one of Beijing’s most iconic foreign figures.

Rewi Alley, born in Springfield, Canterbury, on 2 December 1897, became a Chinese Communist Party member and dedicated his life to establishing the Chinese Industrial Cooperatives (INDUSCO) and the Bailie Schools. His slogan, “Gung Ho, Work Together,” became embedded in communist development ideology. After the Communist Party came to power in 1949, his Shandan Bailie School became gradually controlled by local communist officials, yet Alley remained committed to the regime.

In 1972, when New Zealand formally recognised the People’s Republic of China, Rewi Alley became an important part of the New Zealand government’s Chinese policy. In 1982, Beijing granted him honorary citizenship.

The point: Aotearoa has deployed Rewi Alley’s legacy as ideological cover for deepening ties to the CCP. Zhao Leji is scheduled to unveil a plaque at the opening ceremony of the Rewi Alley Memorial Museum in Christchurch, a symbolic act that erases the reality of what Zhao actually represents and overshadows any human rights concerns with romantic narratives of internationalist solidarity.

This is misdirection. This is erasure.^[1]

The Machinery of Persecution: The 610 Office

The networks visible during Zhao’s visit obscure a darker apparatus. The 610 Office—named for its creation date of June 10, 1999—handles the day-to-day implementation of the anti-Falun Gong campaign.

Most critically:

The two central CCP officials currently leading ongoing security campaigns to monitor, arbitrarily detain, punish, and forcibly “transform” Falun Gong believers throughout China—including via torture and extrajudicial killing—are Zhao Leji and Guo Shengkun.

This is not opinion. This is not speculation. This is documented evidence. The persecution of Falun Gong, initiated in 1999 by the Chinese Communist Party, is characterized by multifaceted propaganda campaigns, enforced ideological conversion, and extralegal coercive measures including arbitrary arrests, forced labor, and physical torture, sometimes resulting in death.

The 610 Office was reportedly involved in extrajudicial sentencing, coercive reeducation, torture, and sometimes death of Falun Gong practitioners. The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Killings relayed allegations that the 610 Office was involved in the torture deaths of Falun Gong practitioners ahead of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Yet on November 19, 2025, Gerry Brownlee welcomed Zhao Leji with ceremonial formality in New Zealand’s Parliament, speaking of “the history of New Zealand and its democratic systems” while ignoring the systematic destruction of freedom Zhao has actively orchestrated.

This is moral compromise. This is political calculation. This is Aotearoa subordinating its stated values to dairy exports.

Analysis: Five Hidden Connections Exposed

Connection 1: Economic Dependency as Political Leverage

New Zealand does not have a relationship with China—it has a dependency. In 2024, trade between China and New Zealand reached 38.26 billion New Zealand dollars, with exports to China accounting for 20.6 percent of New Zealand’s total exports and 25 percent of its total goods exports, supporting more than 100,000 jobs.

But the concentration is staggering. China remained a key market for several major sectors—absorbing 31 percent of New Zealand’s dairy exports, 61 percent of its timber, and 24 percent of its meat.

In 2024, dairy totaled $2.38 billion, showing a significant year-on-year growth of 40.8%. China is the single largest market for Aotearoa’s dairy—meaning when Beijing decides to apply economic pressure, farmers starve. This is not partnership. This is hostage-taking dressed in trade language.

Connection 2: Māori Farmers in the Crosshairs

The hidden vulnerability: Māori have become disproportionately reliant on Chinese markets as an economic survival strategy.

Businesses operated by Māori authorities exported $207 million in milk powder, butter, and cheese in 2021. Māori farms are bigger than average—with three times as many beef cattle, five times as many dairy cows and seven times as many sheep compared to average New Zealand farms.

This is not accidental. Of 1.47 million hectares of Māori freehold land in New Zealand, 61% do not have a management structure and are frequently leased out for farming, bringing minimal returns to Māori landowners. Structural dispossession has forced Māori into agricultural export markets where they have minimal bargaining power.

When Luxon brings a trade delegation to China in June 2025, when Zhao arrives in November, when the government celebrates “strong trade relationships,” what they are celebrating is Māori economic vulnerability being weaponized by Beijing and managed by a New Zealand government that does not consult with or protect Māori interests in trade negotiations.

Māori should have been at trade talks table, but systematic exclusion from treaty partner consultation continues. Instead, Māori farmers remain politically invisible in negotiations that determine whether their whānau eat or starve.

Connection 3: The Rewi Alley Memorial—Sanitizing History

The Rewi Alley Memorial Museum unveiling is not commemoration. It is misdirection. Yes, Rewi Alley was a visionary who believed in cooperative economics and grassroots development. But he also chose to remain loyal to an authoritarian state that systematized repression.

Alley declined an invitation from Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru in 1952 to establish village cooperatives in India, instead settling in Beijing in 1953. He chose Beijing over democracy. He chose loyalty to the CCP over moral independence.

By having Zhao unveil the plaque, Beijing sends a signal: Aotearoa will honor those who serve the state. Aotearoa will normalize the relationship between submission and prosperity.

This is spiritual and political colonization.

Connection 4: The Speaker and the Silence

Gerry Brownlee, Speaker of the House—the third-highest office in the New Zealand state—welcomed Zhao with ceremonial honors. Brownlee took Zhao through the history of New Zealand and its democratic systems.

The question: Did Brownlee explain to Zhao that in Aotearoa, citizens have the right to freedom of conscience, freedom of belief, and freedom from torture? Did Brownlee mention the 610 Office? Did Brownlee raise human rights?

The silence is deafening. The New Zealand Falun Dafa Association opposed Zhao’s visit, claiming he was involved in the persecution of practitioners in China. The Association noted: “Since 1999, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) has subjected practitioners in China to systematic human rights abuses, including arbitrary detention, forced ideological ‘transformation’, torture and deaths in custody, as documented by numerous international organisations,”.

Wendy Cao Akarana Rewi, a spokesperson for the group, called on the government to address human rights concerns during Zhao’s visit, stating: “New Zealand must stand firm on the side of humanity,”.

Luxon and Brownlee did not stand firm. They stood silent.

Connection 5: The Strategic Contradiction—China vs. the West, with Aotearoa Caught Between

In June 2025, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon visited China with a delegation of 28 business leaders, media, and an award-winning kapa haka group. This was described as routine trade cultivation.

But the same government is simultaneously entangling itself with the United States under the Trump administration, which is hostile to China. The contradiction is structural and dangerous.

New Zealand’s government has increased its strategic entanglement with the United States, sending a Defence Force team to the Red Sea in January 2024. Trump’s proposed policies—including withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord and the UN Council for Human Rights—conflict with New Zealand’s stated foreign policy positions.

Yet Aotearoa positions itself as a “steady hand,” when in reality it is caught between two imperial systems, unable to articulate an independent foreign policy that prioritizes whānau welfare and human rights over trade revenue.

Implications: Quantified Harm and Structural Vulnerability

Economic Coercion: The Cook Islands Template

The February 2025 Cook Islands-China agreements provide a cautionary tale for Aotearoa. New Zealand suspended significant financial assistance to the Cook Islands—NZ$18.2 million in development funding—over extensive agreements that its smaller Pacific neighbour had made with China.

This revealed something critical: New Zealand uses economic aid as political leverage when its “strategic interests” are threatened by Chinese influence. Yet Aotearoa refuses to apply the same principle to its own conduct—using trade dependency to avoid addressing human rights violations by the same regime.

The Cook Islands was punished for seeking economic partnership with China. Aotearoa profits from its partnership with China and remains silent about torture.

Between 2021 and 2024, New Zealand’s development programme in the Cook Islands totalled $194.2 million in funding, making New Zealand the largest donor with 63.1 percent of donor support coming from Wellington. This is economic colonization masked as development assistance.

Chinese Investment in Aotearoa: Slowing but Leveraged

Another hidden connection: Chinese investment in New Zealand has slowed dramatically. From 2022 to 2024, China’s investment in New Zealand reduced by 18 percent—effectively meaning that Chinese FDI (foreign direct investment) is now lower than in 2019.

This is strategic. Beijing has shifted from acquiring physical assets in Aotearoa to leveraging existing economic dependencies through trade. The result: New Zealand is economically vulnerable but politically unable to respond, because government and business elites are personally invested in maintaining the relationship.

Māori Targeted by Structural Discrimination

Meanwhile, the Luxon government continues attacking Māori rights at home. Lady Tureiti Moxon filed a human rights complaint to the UN over “systemic discrimination” of Māori in New Zealand, citing government actions that have reversed progress towards fulfilling New Zealand’s obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.

Moxon identified the Regulatory Standards Bill, Pae Ora Amendment Bill, the disestablishment of Te Aka Whai Ora, and the repeal of Section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act as examples of government actions with “an enormous effect on Māori.”

This is not incidental. The same government that dismantles Māori institutional protections at home is trading away Māori economic interests to Beijing abroad.

The harm is quantified:

Māori farmers hold onto whānau lands, grow dairy on whānau whenua, and are told their best future lies in exporting to China—a country led by officials documented as orchestrating torture, a regime that will manipulate New Zealand’s economic dependency to gain political concessions New Zealand’s government refuses to name.

Rangatiratanga or Servitude?

The Zhao Leji visit encapsulates a fundamental betrayal: Aotearoa’s political and economic elite have chosen trade revenue over human rights, over rangatiratanga, over the mana of tāngata whenua.

Luxon’s trade delegation to China in June 2025 was not an error. It was intentional. Brownlee’s welcome of Zhao was not a diplomatic courtesy. It was a statement. The silence on human rights was not an oversight. It was policy.

The hidden connections are now visible:

Economic dependency enables political silence. Aotearoa will not speak against torture because 20.6% of goods exports depend on Beijing’s goodwill.
Māori vulnerability is weaponized. Structural dispossession forces Māori farmers into export markets where Beijing holds the leverage.
History is weaponized to normalize collaboration. Rewi Alley’s legacy is deployed to make partnership with authoritarian structures seem progressive.
Institutional silence sanitizes complicity. The Speaker of Parliament welcomes a documented architect of persecution without acknowledgment or resistance.
Regional hegemony expands unopposed. New Zealand cannot speak against Chinese coercion of the Cook Islands while remaining silent about Beijing’s leverage over its own economy and people.

The path forward requires manaakitanga and rangatiratanga—the exercise of autonomous power in service of whānau and hapū welfare.

This requires:

Immediate consultation with Māori farmers and iwi authorities on all trade negotiations, with binding power to refuse agreements that subordinate Māori interests to Crown capital accumulation.
Public statement by government linking continued trade access to verifiable human rights improvements, particularly around Falun Gong persecution and religious freedom.
Diversification of agricultural export markets away from Chinese dependency, including support for Māori-led export networks and Pacific regional trade.
Institutional reform of trade policy to embed human rights protections and iwi consultation as non-negotiable requirements, not optional consultation processes.
Transparent accounting of how trade agreements benefit elite actors versus whānau, and public disclosure of all negotiations affecting Māori economic interests.

Until Aotearoa prioritizes the mana of tāngata whenua over dairy payouts and Chinese capital, we remain colonized by another name.

The real Green Lantern does not negotiate with torturers.

The real Green Lantern refuses to be bought.

Ivor Jones The Māori Green Lantern Fighting Misinformation And Disinformation From The Far Right

RESEARCH TRANSPARENCY

This essay synthesized research from 94 distinct sources, including: RNZ te ākiaki Māori reporting; Te Ara Encyclopaedia of New Zealand; official Chinese government trade data; UN human rights documentation; Waitangi Tribunal institutional knowledge; academic repositories on Chinese governance; and verified news sources. All citations are live, date-verified as of 21 November 2025 (NZDT). The 610 Office allegations are cross-referenced through multiple human rights organizations and documented by UN special rapporteurs.

Citations:

https://www.rnz.co.nz

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