Red Dragnet｜'Criticise Beijing and You're Anti-China': Inside the Self-Censorship of New Zealand's Chinese Community

Each year a small commemoration is held in Auckland to mark the anniversary of June 4, 1989. Portia Mao, a Mandarin-language journalist who has covered New Zealand's Chinese community since 2004, has attended and reported on it many times.

One year she noticed who Radio New Zealand had sent. The reporter was of Indian descent; not one Mandarin-speaking journalist from the newsroom was there. "The speakers at a commemoration like that are all speaking Mandarin, of course," Mao said. "A reporter of Indian descent can't understand Mandarin. I don't understand why they sent a reporter of Indian descent instead of a Chinese one."

What she noticed afterwards mattered more. The reporter's English copy used the word massacre. When RNZ's Mandarin service rendered the story into Mandarin, it became the Tiananmen incident.

That gap — one story, two languages, two different degrees of truth — is the subject of this final piece in the series. It is also the mildest form of what Beijing's reach looks like when it works on institutions rather than individuals: no bounty, no letter to the neighbors, no fist. Just a word swapped for a softer one.

The most recent test came in Thailand in late July, and it went the other way.

Days before the Taiwan Documentary and Film Festival in Thailand opened its eighth edition in Bangkok, someone identifying himself as an official of the Chinese embassy telephoned both cinemas hosting the event. He said the presence of Taiwan's Ministry of Culture logo on the promotional material made him uncomfortable and asked for it to be removed. Thida Plitpholkarnpim, director of the Thai co-organizer Documentary Club, told Khaosod English that the caller spoke Thai with a Chinese accent, and that he raised his voice and turned threatening when she declined. The next day a second man identifying himself as an embassy official arrived at one of the cinemas in person and repeated the request.

Thida told them that any formal objection should go through Thailand's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and notified Taiwan's representative office. She said it was the first such approach in the festival's eight-year history. The Chinese embassy did not respond to Khaosod English's request for comment. The festival opened as planned on July 22 at the House Samyan cinema, ran through July 26 in Bangkok and Khon Kaen with 17 Taiwanese films, and the logo stayed where it was.

Sunai Phasuk, senior Thailand adviser in Human Rights Watch's Asia division, reads the episode as characteristic in method and unusual in outcome.

"It reflects the kind of bullying behaviour of Beijing expressed through the Chinese embassy in Bangkok," he told Storm Media in an interview for its English edition. "It showed total disregard of the sovereignty of Thailand. It just feels free to do whatever it wants." Reactions to his own post about the case, he said, ran to a still blunter formulation: that China treats Thailand as if it were a colonial possession. The individuals change and the posture does not — "ambassadors come and go, but each and every one of them shares the same attitude."

He identifies three reasons the pressure failed this time, and the first is the one most easily overlooked.

The venue was private. Earlier cultural events on subjects Beijing considers sensitive — Tibet, Xinjiang, the crackdown in Hong Kong — were held in government spaces, where, as Sunai put it, "it could interfere more conveniently, because the government had to please China." He cites a 2023 art exhibition featuring Tibetan and Hong Kong artists that the embassy succeeded in shutting down by calling in Thai authorities. "If this was a government venue, we would see police or other security agencies on the ground from day one, trying to shut the event down. It happened before."

The second factor was the organiser. Documentary Club has strong links to Thailand's democracy movement, and had already had enough of embassy interference. The third was the public. When the story broke it drew hundreds of thousands of reactions, most of them urging the cinemas to hold the line. "The Chinese embassy pressed every day, and they pushed back every day," Sunai said, "until the event concluded successfully and the logo of the Taiwan ministry was not covered or removed at all."

Sunai's own high profile in Thailand has, he thinks, insulated him. Others are approached directly. Human rights workers and journalists who reported on the deportation of 40 Uyghur men to China in February 2025 told him they were contacted by the Chinese embassy and invited in "to have coffee, tea, whatever" — which is to say, to explain themselves.

That is the stick. The carrot is more effective.

"The Chinese embassy maintains a very friendly relationship with media organisations and media agencies in Thailand by sponsoring them to go to China on lavish trips," he said. "Everything was paid for, exclusive interviews, exclusive visits to places which are hard to go, and they maintain friendship at that level. So they use both carrot and stick with the Thai media."

His assessment of the result is unsparing: "It's working very well. The majority of Thai media are considered pro-Beijing, and would not be willing to challenge any misconduct, any bad behaviour by the Chinese embassy here." Universities have gone the same way, he said, through Confucius Institutes, scholarships and institutional partnerships.

The newest instrument is a paper one. Beijing has long been sensitive to what Sunai calls alternative news sources; the response has been to lock in supply. A media cooperation memorandum, he said, was among some 15 agreements signed during Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul's visit to China in July, under which Thai outlets would take China-related news from agencies approved by Beijing — Xinhua among them. 

The instruction embedded in that arrangement, as he characterizes it, is specific about who is not to be heard: "Don't listen to anyone else. Don't listen to Taiwanese news. Don't listen to independent Hong Kong news. Listen to this pro-Beijing news only."

Independent Thai outlets, he added, are among those summoned to the embassy when they publish something considered sensitive.

To see what that pressure produces over twenty years rather than twenty days, Storm Media turned to New Zealand, another country with a large Mandarin-speaking population and a Mandarin-language media ecosystem of its own.

Portia Mao entered the trade there in 2004, and says the landscape has changed visibly since. Mandarin-language newspapers founded by Taiwanese and mainland Chinese immigrants alike once advocated democracy and opposed the Communist Party. None of them survived.

In her early years she felt no particular red line. Publishing unfavorable coverage of China in Mandarin carried no real pressure — in 2007 she wrote a piece commemorating June 4 for the Chinese Herald, the paper she worked for at the time. "China's relationship with the world was friendlier then, and China was still focused on developing its economy." As its power and influence grew, the range of interference widened and the line kept tightening.

She offers one comparison to date the shift. In 2006, Taiwan's cultural and economic office in New Zealand held a National Day reception and invited local politicians and party leaders; Mao was invited as a journalist and took the group photograph of the guests. "At the time everyone thought it was completely normal," she said. "But last year the people who attended Taiwan's National Day event — local New Zealand politicians — were criticized by the Chinese government. Something everyone once found acceptable, something Beijing did not seem to mind, is suddenly something it minds very much. You can see from that how the pressure has come with the growth in influence."

She has made the same point publicly, noting in a LinkedIn post that China's ambassador to New Zealand last year rebuked legislators who attended the National Day reception — a marked departure from the taoguang yanghui  (韜光養晦)restraint prescribed by Deng Xiaoping and still broadly observed two decades ago under President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶).

New Zealand's Mandarin-language outlets, in her assessment, lean conservative and tend to echo Beijing's framing — for reasons that are not mysterious. China's growing power and influence, its position as New Zealand's most important trading partner, and the government's own friendly relations with Beijing are all factors that cannot be ignored. Migrants also arrive carrying the frames they grew up with, which produces what she considers a contradiction: reluctance to criticise the Chinese government alongside complete comfort in criticizing New Zealand's.

"Beijing's nationalist propaganda has been extremely successful," she said. "A lot of people think loving the country means loving the party. Chinese New Zealanders think criticizing the New Zealand prime minister or New Zealand politicians is entirely their right — but criticize the Chinese government and that's not allowed, you're anti-China, the label goes straight on you. It's deeply divisive, and quite a few people think this way."

There is also a technical chokepoint. WeChat, and its mainland version Weixin (微信), is the dominant social platform in New Zealand's Chinese community, and almost every Mandarin-language outlet there depends on it for distribution. The platform's own moderation filters out views and information Beijing does not permit.

"The WeChat platform plays a decisive role in this," Mao said. "WeChat certainly has its own censorship powers. When people post, they self-censor without realising it, and if you get reported the post is deleted."

The consequence is structural rather than editorial: outlets and stories that do not fit Beijing's framing are simply less visible inside the community, whatever their merits.

Commercial outlets facing commercial pressure is one thing. Mao's sharper complaint concerns Radio New Zealand, the state public broadcaster, which established a Mandarin-language service in 2024. She had expectations for it — she took part in the effort to get it started.

What she says she found instead was avoidance. On sensitive China stories the service would choose to sidestep them rather than report, and where it did report, it would often reach for language that played the event down. Her June 4 example is the sharpest: massacre in English, "incident" in Mandarin. She also points to coverage of Jimmy Lai, the jailed founder of Hong Kong's Apple Daily — RNZ published a story in English, and the Chinese service chose not to run it. She raised the translation issue publicly on X in 2024.

Her verdict is comparative, and she keeps it inside a defined set. Among the state-funded national broadcasters of Western countries, she said, "RNZ's Mandarin service is arguably the worst of the lot" — an outlet, in her view, that has not discharged the duty a public broadcaster owes its audience.

Two things complicate that judgement, and both come from Mao's own account. A subsequent search of RNZ's Mandarin output shows the Tiananmen anniversary rendered as "incident" one year and, the following year, with headlines using both "Tiananmen massacre" and "the June 4 incident" — movement, if not resolution. 

Asked whether China's Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, in force since July 1, will deepen the uniformity of opinion in New Zealand's Chinese community, Mao's answer is measured rather than alarmed. The law carries a degree of menace, she allows — but she does not expect it to change the environment much, because the ground it would occupy is already taken.

New Zealand's Chinese community, as she puts it, is already extremely "well-behaved": "From the media down to individuals, there are already very few people willing to speak up, to publish anything unfavorable to the Chinese government."

What she does think may bite is domestic. New Zealand's Crimes (Countering Foreign Interference) Amendment Act 2025 took effect on November 27 last year, adding offences to the Crimes Act 1961 with maximum penalties of 14 years' imprisonment for intentional foreign interference and 10 years where the conduct is reckless, along with sentence uplifts for existing offences such as intimidation and blackmail when committed to benefit a foreign power. The Act's own definition of foreign interference names the mechanism directly: an act by a foreign state, "often through a proxy," intended to disrupt or subvert New Zealand's national interests by covert, deceptive, corruptive or coercive means.

That is precisely the gap Canadian critics say their own foreign interference legislation left open — the intermediaries a state rents rather than employs.

The law has not gone unchallenged at home. The New Zealand Council for Civil Liberties argued during its passage that the drafting was broad enough to catch people engaged in legitimate political activity, including protest.

Mao's interest in it is narrower and more practical. She thinks it will deter a particular kind of local actor — the pro-Beijing figures and online nationalists who might use China's new law as cover to harass Chinese New Zealanders, and who already pick fights with anyone they judge to be anti-China. "These people don't really have a belief," she said. "Most of them have made patriotism into a business, for personal gain. Once they know the consequences are serious and they could face criminal liability, maybe they'll weigh it up."

New Zealand's intelligence service has described the environment they operate in. Its Security Threat Environment 2025 report, released last August, names the Chinese Communist Party's United Front Work Department as an example of an organisation conducting foreign interference, seeking to build influence with individuals and organisations outside mainland China, including in New Zealand, in pursuit of the Chinese government's interests worldwide. The report is careful to add that not all United Front activity constitutes foreign interference and that some engagement can benefit New Zealand organisations — while describing its methods as regularly deceptive, coercive and corruptive.

Mao is insistent about what she is not. She is not, she says, a democracy fighter on the front line of a human rights movement. She is a journalist with professional standards who did what the job required, and for that was threatened, attacked and taken to court by pro-Beijing figures.

Being taken to court is itself a chilling event for a small community, Mao acknowledges — but she thinks winning was the more consequential fact. For freedom of expression among Chinese New Zealanders, she said, the outcome was at least a positive one.

Which returns the series to where it started, with a different answer. The methods change with the target: a punch in Taichung, letters to a neighbor's letterbox in England, a plane leaving a military airfield outside Bangkok, a word altered in translation in Auckland. What is being purchased in every case is the same thing — someone deciding it is not worth it. The cases that stand out, from a Thai cinema that kept a logo to a journalist who got a gagging order lifted, are the ones where somebody declined to make that calculation.

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