A China-born MP for New Zealand’s ruling party has denied being a spy after it emerged that he had spent years studying and teaching in universities with links to Chinese intelligence services.



“I am not a spy,” Yang Jian, the National party’s first MP born in mainland China, told reporters on Wednesday after a joint investigation by the Financial Times and New Zealand’s Newsroom revealed what they described as his hidden past.

According to the New Zealand Herald the 55-year-old MP rejected the accusations as a racist “smear campaign” targeting him “just because I am Chinese”.



Yang emigrated to New Zealand from China in 1999 to take a job teaching international relations at Auckland University. Twelve years later he became an MP, quoting China’s former Communist party leader, Deng Xiaoping, in his debut speech to parliament.

“I don’t care if it is a white cat or a black cat,” the National party legislator said. “It’s a good cat as long as it catches mice.”

On Wednesday Yang was battling claims not that he was a black or a white cat, but a Trojan horse, after claims New Zealand’s security services had been investigating him for ties to China’s intelligence services.

“I refute any allegations that question my loyalty to New Zealand … Although I was not born here I am proud to call myself a New Zealander, obey our laws and contribute to this country,” he told a press conference. “I challenge those who are propagating these defamatory statements to front up and prove it.”

The reported interest in Yang by New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) stems from time he spent at two academic institutions in his native China between 1978 and 1994.



One is the Air Force Engineering Academy of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA), where he studied English language as an undergraduate and subsequently taught.

The other is the Luoyang Foreign Language Institute in the central province of Henan. According to the Financial Times, that school is attached to the third department of the PLA’s general staff headquarters, which it described as China’s answer to the US National Security Agency (NSA) or the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The newspaper said the school specialised in training both “openly acknowledged military intelligence officers and ‘secret line’ deep cover agents”.

“Everyone I know who’s attended the Luoyang Foreign Language Institute has been in Chinese military intelligence or at least linked to that system,” Peter Mattis, a Jamestown Foundation expert on China’s military and intelligence, was quoted as saying.

On Wednesday, Yang admitted he had spent time at both institutions but insisted there had been nothing untoward about his work.

He released a CV which showed he had received a BA in English from the Air Force Engineering school in 1982 and an MA in American studies from the Luoyang school in 1990.



The CV also showed that from 1982 to 1987 he worked as a “teaching assistant (associate lecturer)” at the former and a lecturer at the latter from 1990 until 1993 when he moved to Australia to study at the Australian National University.

According to stuff.co.nz, New Zealand’s biggest news website, Yang admitted that as a lecturer he had taught students how to intercept and decipher communications but not to engage in “the physical act of spying”.

“If you define those cadets or students as spies, then yes, I was teaching spies,” he said. “[But] I don’t think [they were spies] … I just think they are collecting information through communication in China.”

The National party president, Peter Goodfellow, defended his MP after Wednesday’s revelations. “You’re making a number of assumptions based on his background and I’d be careful unless you have proof of what you’re saying,” he told Newsroom.

However, in a statement the MP Winston Peters said Yang’s links to Chinese intelligence were worrying: “The National party either spectacularly failed to check out this candidate, or were totally naive about what his background meant.”

The prime minister, Bill English, told reporters he had been aware of Yang’s background and did not believe the Chinese politician had tried to hide it. However, in a Chinese-language interview with the Financial Times, Yang reportedly asked repeatedly that information about his academic past in China be omitted from any article about him. “You don’t need to write too much about myself,” he reportedly said.

In his six years as an MP for New Zealand’s ruling National party, Yang has been a vocal supporter of China’s Communist party.

In his Mandarin-peppered maiden speech he recalled how his family had suffered under Mao Zedong’s tumultuous reign, which ended with his death at the end of the Cultural Revolution, in 1976.



“By the year of my birth, in 1962, China had wiped out private ownership … a horrific famine had just passed with the deaths of millions of people … by 1978 the Chinese economy was on the verge of collapse.”

However, the naturalised MP also heaped praise on the “awe-inspiring” changes China had witnessed after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s. “We are all aware of China’s enormous economic growth … China has risen to become the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese government has successfully lifted millions of people out of poverty.”

Despite this, Yang said many Chinese were choosing to move to New Zealand thanks to its “second-to-none environment, democratic political system, equal economic opportunities and stable society”.