As a European New Zealander who has visited CHina and spent 6 weeks seeing you country and people at first hand, I am very sad that relations between China and my country have worsened recently. 

Chinese people need to understand the huge pressure that the USA and other countries can put on a small country like New Zealand. We are only 5 million people.

The USA can exert trade pressure and they can threaten to deny us intelligence on terrorist activity. Without this intelligence we are very open to terrorism of various kinds.

The USA and NZ have been allies and friends for a long time but we have stood up to the USA previously when we banned their warships from our waters because they would not say whether those ships carried nuclear weapons. We will not allow ships with nuclear weapons in our waters. We won that fight but only in the face of financial and political sanctions by the USA.

The situation regarding Hong Kong is more complicated for the NZ government as we are also being put under pressure by the UK and Australia as well as the USA. I hope that Trump will lose the election in November and this will make things easier for us.

I am hoping that good relations between China and New Zealand can be restored soon.