NZ's connections to Asia more important than ever - Leadership Network member
Leadership Network graduate member Charlie Gao’s life and career have been shaped by Asia, although it’s a connection he didn’t always embrace in his youth. His experiences and connections through the Leadership Network helped open his eyes to the possibilities that a strong connection with Asia could offer – both for him personally and for New Zealand. In October, Charlie takes the next step in his career, becoming executive director of the New Zealand China Council. To mark 20 years of the Foundation’s Leadership Network, we’re catching up with some of its early members to explore how their connections with Asia, and their experiences through the Leadership Network, have shaped their lives and careers.
Charlie on joining the Leadership Network: "It felt like I'd found my tribe.”
New Zealand has made progress in its knowledge and understanding of Asia, but Charlie Gao says that progress cannot be taken for granted.
“We will lose that knowledge, we will lose those relationships, unless we keep actually resourcing them and putting our energy, putting our time, and our attention there,” he says.
Charlie spent nine years with China-focused corporate advisory and investment firm Mahon China, some of that time in Beijing, advising major New Zealand and international clients including Fonterra, Zespri, Les Mills and Wētā Workshop.
The work ranged from “solving problems in China” to “trying to exit investments that had gone pear-shaped” to finding the “right partner” to working out whether that partner was “telling you the truth”, he says.
Charlie with fellow Leadership Network member Jack Sheppard at the Shanghai World Expo 2010
He returned to Auckland in 2017 - his eldest son, Ray, was three, Beijing's air was bad, and the grandparents and cousins were here - and stayed on with Mahon, setting up its New Zealand office.
But his own connection with China began much earlier.
Charlie was born there and left at four, when his father, among the early cohorts of Chinese students again permitted to study abroad, took the family to the United Kingdom for a master’s and PhD.
After four or five years in the United States, they arrived in New Zealand when Charlie was 11.
“Like a lot of 1.5 generation kids, I didn't really think about China much,” he says.
“My friends weren't Chinese. China was something that almost felt like a burden - extra language classes, extra homework. I was just like, what's the point of this? We speak English here. My friends are out there. It didn't seem very real when I was young.”
That changed in his early 20s, when he left an unsatisfying science career to study political economy and Asian studies, and found the Foundation's Leadership Network.
“It felt like I'd found my tribe,” he says.
In 2006, as a “really green uni student”, he joined an Asia New Zealand Foundation track II (informal diplomacy) delegation to Kuala Lumpur, where Richard Grant was among the senior people on the trip.
Before one of the formal events, Richard rang his hotel room and suggested they meet in the lobby for a beer.
“I was the greenest member, but I was a member, and Dick really made me feel that way,” Charlie says.
Charlie (far left) with fellow Leadership Network members (and others) in Beijing circa 2010
A scholarship to study Chinese at Peking University and work at the New Zealand Centre on that campus took him to Beijing.
Now, he says, those opportunities are thinning.
He points to the Prime Minister's Scholarships to Asia, the North Asia Centre of Asia-Pacific Excellence – where he worked from 2020 to 2024 – and university programmes in Asian languages and history as examples of opportunities that have been cut, reduced or lost.
Which makes the Asia New Zealand Foundation's work, he says, “just as relevant as ever” - “if anything, even more important now”.
He says the need extends well beyond China.
Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and India are, he says, “the most dynamic and fastest growing regions in the world – not just economically, but they're having such a big cultural influence, their political influence is huge”.
For a small nation like New Zealand, he says, the need to engage is only more pressing: “It's really important for us to be as knowledgeable and as able to take advantage and to engage as possible.”
He also sees New Zealand's growing diversity as a reason to build greater understanding between cultures.
For “a really healthy, inclusive society”, New Zealanders need to make the effort to understand other cultures and help newer arrivals find their footing, he says.
“Not that everybody's got to be the same, but there's got to be some integration.”
Charlie’s upcoming role as executive director of the New Zealand China Council, where he will succeed former Asia New Zealand Foundation director of business Alistair Crozier in October, puts him in a new position to continue that kaupapa.
Charlie with his son, Ray, in Beijing in 2016
The council brings together government, business and other sectors to build and maintain New Zealand's relationship with China.
“The work centres around how you support the relationship to be constructive, to be resilient and to be mature,” he says. “It's never smooth sailing all the time with China, but the organisation looks at the relationship as being something so important that we have to actively manage it as such.”
Fatherhood has also changed his perspective.
“It feels like we have more skin in the game…we want New Zealand to be prosperous, we want it to be open, we want it to be safe, because we want those things for our children,” he says.
The Asia New Zealand Foundation Leadership Network equips the next generation of Kiwi leaders to thrive in Asia. We provide members with the connections, knowledge and confidence to lead New Zealand’s future relationship with the region.
