New Zealand is determined not to keep China’s espionage a secret

New Zealand had long been considered the weakest link in Five Eyes and the easiest for China to try to cow. But New Zealand has now called out China by name in its intelligence warnings so often that officials joke it has become tougher on Beijing than Australia is.

The latest annual threat assessment issued by the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (Opens in new window) on Thursday is notably blunt.

Spy services with “a voracious appetite” for information – especially those from China – have dramatically stepped-up efforts to gain an advantage over New Zealand and its partners, it warns. The efforts to get information about critical assets “cannot be described as benign”.

“There are several states that conduct espionage against New Zealand, but the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the only country we have detected doing it at scale,” it says.

Over the past four years, the spy agency has steadily raised the alarm about Chinese intelligence activity targeting New Zealand, including efforts to acquire information for political or corporate use, gain influence and repress Chinese communities in New Zealand.

Mike Burgess, the head of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, does not name China explicitly in his equivalent threat assessments.

China has bristled at New Zealand’s increasingly pointed language and has tried to steer it back into silence, or at least softness.

The growing tensions were most evident last month when Beijing angrily denounced Foreign Minister Winston Peters (Opens in new window) for describing China as a nation of liars. The previous month, Beijing put travel bans on four backbench MPs who’d travelled to Taiwan (Opens in new window), as New Zealand parliamentarians have done for decades – an apparent attempt to set a new red line.

But New Zealand’s spy agency expects the current turbulence in the global order could be felt locally in unique ways, as a country not only highly interconnected with the rest of the world but located in the Pacific and close to Antarctica.

“These factors in combination make New Zealand not only geopolitically relevant, but also attractive to threat actors,” NZSIS director-general Andrew Hampton said in a foreword to the report.

The challenging global context will be of particular concern over the next few months as New Zealand heads towards a hotly contested general election on 7 November. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was able to see off a potential challenge to his leadership this week, but the politics are far from settled.

New Zealand recently joined (Opens in new window) with other partners in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network to warn that China is targeting their citizens on job sites through an “aggressive (Opens in new window)” online recruitment strategy to get access to classified or sensitive information. National security clearance holders, military personnel and those with access to sensitive government information are particularly at risk.

It also warned that public and private sectors are being targeted by foreign states and their proxies.

“We see the potential for real harm,” the report says, noting that a highly motivated state will “often use any means at their disposal” and that the security services expect espionage activity to increase in frequency over the next year.

The kind of information the spies are seeking is broader than just classified information. The service warned academics at universities and research institutions to be alert to attempts by foreign states to secure technology that can be repurposed for military development.

“Dual-use technologies have both civilian and military functions, but the distinction has become increasingly blurred with modern warfare now weaponising commercial tools such as AI and off-the-shelf drones,” it says.

In other instances, state-supported actors have tried to deceptively obtain sensitive technology by using international front companies and supply chain intermediaries to present a plausible cover story.

This has been particularly notable in New Zealand’s burgeoning space sector, with the spy service noting that Purple Mountain Observatory, linked to a Chinese state research institution, had tried to install ground-based space infrastructure in New Zealand.

In one case study included in the report, a Russian state-owned organisation sought to acquire specialised components from the offshore subsidiary of a New Zealand-registered company. The technology could have been used to enhance Russia’s military capability, and was therefore prohibited under sanctions.