Four New Zealand MPs have been quietly banned from China for a year after travelling to Taiwan on a junket. The group—ACT’s Laura McClure, New Zealand First’s David Wilson, Labour’s Duncan Webb and National’s Maureen Pugh—travelled as part of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Taiwan, which promotes cross-party engagement and economic ties.
China didn’t like it. They decided to impose a sanction but they didn’t announce it publicly. Instead, last week the Chinese embassy contacted our Parliament and requested a meeting to deliver key messages, suggesting the bans could be lifted if the MPs apologised.
Laura McClure was on with Heather this morning. She was asked, “Will you apologise?” and she said, “No. This is a type of foreign interference. I did nothing wrong.”
MFAT also confirmed this is the first time China has sanctioned New Zealand MPs for such a trip, even though past delegations—including one involving John Key as a backbencher—have faced no consequences whatsoever.
Now, this has provoked some angry responses. Human rights groups are speaking out—Pillar calls it intimidation—and Professor Anne-Marie Brady, who has had disputes with China, calls it a punishment we should retaliate against. She points out that in 2021 the European Union cancelled official dialogue with China after a similar sanction on politicians.
But what China has done here is, to me, neither a meaningful punishment nor particularly damaging. A tit-for-tat retaliation like the one the European Union instituted would do nothing for New Zealand. A ban on four MPs visiting China for a year really isn’t much of a punishment—they had no plans to go there anyway.
Retaliation, however, could be damaging. What I think we should do instead is object strongly. This story happened last week and was kept under wraps until Laura McClure leaked it. I think that was a mistake. We should have gone public immediately—made a big noise about it.
We should tell China, “This is not the way we behave.” We should urge them to grow up and point out that denying these MPs the chance to visit also denies China the opportunity to show New Zealand that it can be a reasonable member of the international community—that it can make a reasonable and humanitarian case on Taiwan.
After all, we support the One China policy. But actions like this suggest that China itself does not follow that principle in spirit and instead intends to subsume Taiwan without respecting its rights.
So we should say, “No, that was the wrong thing to do,” while at the same time taking no retaliatory action—maintaining the higher moral ground.
Because, in my view, this was a poor show by China. It weakens them and their case—not us.
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