Some call him a panda-hugger, others say he’s ‘gone native” but a Kiwi Sinophile is unapologetic.
David Mahon is a gritty sort of New Zealander – almost from a previous era when a plucky Kiwi could go somewhere like Beijing, get a sense that “something big was happening” and never leave.
“China views us as a rare friend,” Mahon told an audience of China watchers in a lucid off-the-cuff speech at Auckland’s conservative establishment HQ, the Northern Club. He urged New Zealand to embrace an independent approach to China and not be drawn into old alliances with the United States and Europe.
It used to be said that someone who had lived in a foreign country and embraced it maybe a little too much for his countrymen had “gone native”. Of course, that’s a very British Empire label, the sort of thing that might have been said over a pink gin in George Orwell’s novel of colonial snobbery, Burmese Days: whispers of being “too close to the locals”.
Mahon has lived in Beijing for nearly 40 years and has certainly embraced China, carving out a consultancy that advises on doing business and investing there. In a sense he is an unofficial ambassador or a go-between, sought out by businesses, politicians and others. He advocates pragmatic and friendly relations between Wellington and Beijing.
His critics see him as someone who has in a more modern sense “gone native”. One China veteran described him to me as a “panda-hugger” and another said he was “very pro-CCP” – the Chinese Communist Party. (He says he is neither a member nor an acolyte.)
Mahon says New Zealand should be a “trusted friend” to China. However, reinforcing alliances with the United States and Australia – especially the idea of joining some element of the Aukus agreement with them and the United Kingdom – puts that at risk. “I feel we need to give China a fair go, Vietnam a fair go,” he told the Listener, expanding on that theme to say we should engage more with Indonesia and develop strong connections with India and Muslim countries through our migrant communities.
He says Wellington needs to understand developing countries, not align with the old world, and develop a genuinely independent foreign policy based on our principles – such as the foundational belief in a nuclear-free New Zealand, widely accepted across society.
His view on engaging with China fits well with that of former prime minister John Key, who is often seen as a pragmatist, describes himself as a friend of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, and continues to represent business interests in Wellington and Beijing.
There is also a touch of Helen Clark and Jacinda Ardern in Mahon’s wish for an independent course. “We can’t be strategically greedy and want everyone to consider us a nice country that will stand by them. We have to take the position that there are crucial principles by which we should stand and our politicians should stand.”
His message that we need to engage with China as a commitment to an inevitable Asian future, not a colonial past attached to Britain or US hegemony, conflicts with many China experts, who warn of CCP infiltration and the rejection of democratic values. “I understand people label people. But those people … haven’t had the experiences that I’ve had the privilege to have. Therefore, their understanding is limited in terms of what China is and what I’m talking about. I don’t judge their reaction to me.”
Work with, not against
The most charitable China expert I talked to likened Mahon to former Australian prime minister Paul Keating, who also advocates working with, not against, China: “He and Keating believe in a China that no longer exists.”
Under Xi, China has turned its back on what politicians of the Keating and later Key era thought would happen – opening up more, developing economically, and inevitably becoming more democratic.
There is little doubt some of the views of Mahon, who often appears on China-owned television news stations and writes positively about Beijing in his newsletters, risk being snobbish. He is, after all, a former carpet layer for Feltex who had an epiphany in the 1980s that something big was happening in China and he wanted to be part of that future. He is a self-made businessman and a self-made analyst of China by hard knocks and life lessons.
“I went there when I was 27. I learnt Chinese by learning five words a day. New Zealanders should listen to someone they think has something to share with them.
“I have always considered myself a New Zealander in China. I don’t believe I could have lived and worked in China without having been brought up in New Zealand.
“My obligation, I think, is to share my experiences … but I don’t have a prescription as to how they are received.”
Mahon realises some China watchers see him as a patsy and some are condescending in their view.
He freely acknowledges he is a student of the school of life: “I left school at 16, I have a carpet-layer’s trade. I did a couple of papers at Auckland University: ancient history, and etymology. I consider myself someone who tries to be as integrated as I can so I can think freely and energetically and increase empathy with others.”
Perhaps empathy, considered views and following your instincts were instilled around the family’s Auckland dinner table: Mahon’s father, Bryan, was a lawyer and World War II veteran (about whom Mahon wrote a Listener article in April 2021), his mother, Dorothy, an architect. Elder brother Antony is a District Court judge, sister Justine recently retired as principal of leading Auckland girls’ school St Cuthbert’s College, and younger brother Tim was a founding member of Blam Blam Blam.
A leap of faith
There is something hard-bitten and informed by experience that appeals in Mahon’s view of China and his belief that New Zealand has an opportunity to engage and gain from the relationship. It is based on real-life exposure to China from the early days of Deng Xiaoping to the Tiananmen Square massacre, which he witnessed, hanging on the coat-tails of the explosion of Chinese economic growth in the 1990s and 2000s, and now Xi.
“I am someone who has great faith in China and the current direction of China,” he says. “I don’t have a relationship with the Communist Party. I don’t have a relationship with communism.
“I also don’t benefit from the Chinese government in my commercial activities. My clients are the ones that I focus on – I focus on social and economic developments and if I get it wrong, my clients fire me.
“If I make the wrong calls, you lose money … so that’s what sits over what I do. You have to be accurate.”
Other opinions are available, whether they are from Key as a fan of Beijing or the University of Canterbury academic Anne-Marie Brady, who takes a strong stance on the CCP and its infiltration of New Zealand, the threats China poses and the naivety of China fans.
Mahon remains engaged in the business and investment life of China. His advisory firm has about nine staff, almost all Chinese. It works with a range of investors and helps companies – including kiwifruit marketing company Zespri – to grow in China. His firm has also worked in resolving distressed debt, developing funds and all manner of risks.
On the outlook for China, Mahon sees the vast middle class as critical to the future and says the CCP is listening to that group as it tries to increase wealth across society.
By some measures, the Chinese economy is already larger than the United States’. China is by far New Zealand’s biggest two-way trade partner and a big source of foreign direct investment.
Mahon says the prospects remain strong, despite a questionable transition from the dramatic shutdown during Covid and the reluctance to lift restrictions, a fast-moving property crisis and tensions with the United States, which Mahon says is trying to stall the inevitable rise of China.
Territorially, he says, there’s no risk of an invasion of Taiwan but instead, the increasing US military co-operation with the Philippines makes it a more volatile theatre.
“The Western world is in decline. It’s a normal phase. It’s something the major powers in the West are denying vociferously. A country such as New Zealand is young and diverse and in a geographically unusual position. It doesn’t need to be part of the declining West. It can be part of the emerging global south in a unique way,” Mahon says.
He reckons New Zealand can make its own way as a regional player of goodwill and a committed member of the international community, not a military alliance.
“The only thing we have to protect and defend is our sovereignty, our independence of foreign policy, which means sometimes we may condemn what China has done. And sometimes we will do what we chose to do, which was to say the invasion of Iraq was illegal. And so it’s not about being nice to China. It’s about being independent and respected.”
That idea of independence and the critical importance of China is based on its inexorable progress over his four decades in Beijing. “China has arrived in all of our lives.”
