China protests after New Zealand foreign minister's racist remark

China's embassy in New Zealand lodged a formal diplomatic protest with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade after Foreign Minister Winston Peters told Green MP Lawrence Xu-Nan to “go back to your own country.” The complaint, filed on July 30, escalated a parliamentary clash into a diplomatic row with Beijing.

The confrontation began during a heated exchange in Wellington in July 2026, when Peters, who leads New Zealand First, also called Xu-Nan a “loudmouth.” Coverage identified Xu-Nan as Chinese-born and raised in Auckland, making the attack a flashpoint in a country where debates over immigration and race often feed directly into politics.

Wang Xiaolong, China’s ambassador to New Zealand, responded publicly on social media in what coverage described as a rare rebuke. His message, in effect, said Peters’ remarks reflected more on the speaker than on the target, a pointed intervention that signaled Beijing was not treating the episode as a routine insult.

Peters has not apologized and has continued to defend himself publicly, deepening the dispute. The reaction inside New Zealand was swift. The Green Party condemned the comments, Asian community leaders in Auckland voiced concern, and former prime minister Helen Clark said Peters was “inviting a sacking” over the attack on the Green MP.

The row landed at a sensitive moment in New Zealand’s relationship with China, where trade and diplomacy depend on careful management even as domestic politics grows more confrontational. Reuters said the embassy’s protest marked an escalation from earlier criticism, showing how a nationalist and anti-immigrant style of politics inside a democracy can spill into foreign policy and test the government’s credibility at home.