China protests New Zealand minister's remark in racism row

China lodged a formal diplomatic protest after New Zealand foreign minister Winston Peters told Green Party MP Lawrence Xu-Nan to “go back to your own country” during a parliamentary debate in Wellington on Wednesday.

The comment, delivered by Peters, who leads New Zealand First, instantly turned a domestic clash over parliamentary conduct into a wider racism and diplomacy row. Xu-Nan is Chinese-born and grew up in Auckland, a detail that sharpened criticism of the remark as more than a personal insult and raised questions about how immigrant lawmakers are treated inside Parliament.

Beijing’s embassy in Wellington said it had raised official complaints over the comments, while Chinese officials urged New Zealand politicians not to invoke Beijing in domestic disputes. The response put China directly into a fight that began on the floor of Parliament and quickly became a test of political norms in New Zealand, where the language used by senior ministers toward minority lawmakers can carry consequences far beyond the chamber.

Peters has refused to back down, deepening the dispute and amplifying concerns among his critics that populist rhetoric can spill into foreign policy. New Zealand media reported backlash from politicians across the spectrum, former prime minister Helen Clark, and members of Auckland’s Chinese and Asian communities, who said the remark was insulting and risked widening divisions.

The argument also reverberated well beyond Wellington. International outlets carried the story within hours, and Chinese state-linked outlets and regional media cast it as a broader diplomatic incident rather than a one-off parliamentary flare-up. The framing gave Beijing a chance to present itself as defending Chinese communities while pressing New Zealand not to drag China into local political fights.

For New Zealand, the episode laid bare the pressure on public institutions to protect parliamentary debate without normalizing ethnic slurs. For China, it offered another opening to leverage sensitive political language in a country with significant trade ties and an increasingly fraught public conversation about race, identity and the place of Chinese New Zealanders in national life.