Professor Anne-Marie Brady speaking at the symposium titled “Countering Foreign Interference” in Auckland, New Zealand, on Feb. 21, 2026. Li Tong/The Epoch Times
AUCKLAND, New Zealand—After scholar Anne-Marie Brady’s home was burglarized in the wake of a groundbreaking exposé of the Chinese Communist Party’s foreign interference, police were prevented from speaking openly, she says.
In 2017, Brady released a paper titled “Magic Weapons: China’s Political Influence Activities Under Xi Jinping.”
Her home would later be burglarized twice, in December 2017 and on Feb. 14, 2018, and her laptop was stolen. Her car was also tampered with, and she received a written threat.
The professor from the University of Canterbury maintains that Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents or sympathizers were likely involved, and when she complained to police, they were apparently unable to deal with it openly.
“I thought our police were part of that, and then we discovered, ‘Oh my God, they have been infiltrated,’” she said in her address to a symposium titled “Countering Foreign Interference” in Auckland last month.
“I had some good police officers who knew straight away, and they saw what was going on, but they couldn’t, in New Zealand’s situation, say it out loud, and they told me about problems with New Zealand Police that were worrying them terribly.”
Brady said that law enforcement had steadily come to a different understanding of the situation, that they were “reluctantly changing.” Over the past decade, the New Zealand Security Intelligence Service and Government Communications Security Bureau have appeared before parliamentary inquiries to address foreign interference from Beijing.
“We’re just gonna keep the pressure on them, because we need them to be what we think that they are, which is defending our interests, and defending our laws,” Brady said.
She said that her country’s intelligence services needed the “public licence” to continue their work in this area.
In 2019, then-Detective Superintendent Stu Allsopp-Smith said there were no further lines of inquiry to pursue in Brady’s case.
“Police have taken these incidents very seriously and a lengthy, detailed and extensive investigation has been conducted,” he said, as reported by Radio New Zealand.
“This has involved all necessary police resources including detailed forensic analysis, interviews and expert advice. The burglaries and other matters reported remain unresolved at this time.”
