As if this campaign was not weird enough. Newsroom and the Financial Times have broken a story confirming that National MP Jian Yang was educated in a Chinese University that concentrated on training Chinese spies and he was investigated by the SIS for his Chinese Government links.
From Newsroom:
A National Party MP who studied at an elite Chinese spy school before moving to New Zealand has attracted the interest of our Security Intelligence Service.
The list MP Jian Yang did not mention in his work or political CVs a decade he spent in the People’s Liberation Army-Air Force Engineering College or the Luoyang language institute run by China’s equivalent of the United States National Security Agency.
That agency, the Third Department, conducts spying activities for China.
Newsroom has been told that to have taught at the Air Force Engineering College, Yang would have almost certainly been an officer in Chinese military intelligence and a member of the Communist Party, as other students and staff have been.
Yang studied and then taught there before moving to Australia where he attended the Australian National University in Canberra. He migrated to this country to teach international relations in the politics department at the University of Auckland.
He was hand-picked by National Party president Peter Goodfellow to become an MP on its list in 2011, wooed directly by the former Prime Minister John Key and has been a key fundraiser for National among the Chinese community in Auckland.
As an MP he variously served on Parliament’s Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade (from 2014 until last year), Commerce, Transport and Industrial Relations and Health and Science select committees and is prominent in New Zealand’s interactions with the Chinese community and diplomatic and consular missions in Wellington and Auckland. He remains a Parliamentary Private Secretary for ethnic affairs.
There are lots and lots and lots of questions surrounding this story and questions about what John Key and Bill English knew about Yang’s background. They must have been briefed by the SIS on this. And this will not blow over in a couple of days.
Strange times …
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