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
