But that
@Lure guy has a logic that says if western media disrespects you, it sees you as an adversary. And if they don't disrespect you, it means that they see you as someone that they can influence.
I just want to use some examples to show that his logic is silly.
But yes, I agree that western media disrespected China back then because it looked down on China.
I'm sorry but with what example particularly did you disprove my logic? Because if I was able to understand your counter thesis (I mean if you logic made sense) I would be more than happily reply you to support my argument.
If I might need to educate you, Henry Kissinger's foreign policy during the Cold War was based on isolating the Soviet Union from it's allies. If you look at the Soviet Sphere of Influence back in 1950's -the start of the competition between Eastern and Western Blocks- you can see that most of the Asian Nations were covered by that. Soviets were allies with China and had extremely close relations with India which is the result of, I should admit, an extremely clever and beutifully crafted foreign policy.
In Khrushchev era, Soviet Union and China started to have problems. Mostly about the Culture Revolution and the Great Leap Forward policies. Khrushchev was so eager to be consulted about these policies whereas Mao wasn't a fan of taking ideas from Khrushchev. After the huge disasters resulting from the Great Leap Forward, Khrushchev publicly denounced the policies of Mao. This started the process of Sino-Soviet Split. After a decade long bitter relations between China and USSR, Henry Kissinger believed that China might actually appreciate US help to completely seperate it's policies from USSR and emerge as a "third power" of Cold War which would be the loss of a major ally and further isolation for USSR.
In this period, China had reformed it's economic policies, opened it's economy to rest of the World. Started to walk in a path that would transform it's socialist economy into a free market economy and played a counter-balance role in USSR policies regarding East and South Asia. One of the resulting acts about this is Chinese Intervention of Vietnam-Cambodian (favoring Cambodia) war and India-Pakistan (favoring Pakistan) conflicts.
In return China had made itself into UN -Taiwan kicked out-, and "One China Policy" was recognized by USA. In this era -70's and 80's- China was favored by the mainstream Western Media because US foreign policy was friendly towards China. It's the issue of carrot and stick. If China aligns itself with Western policies it receives the carrot, if it tried to revision Western status quo, China receives the stick.
And about the NZ issue. Are you kidding? New Zealend is a major non-Nato US ally. NZ can publicly critisize US. This would not change their status. Germany also publicly critisized US for it's ME campaign. Even some senior decision makers in USA critisized USA's ME campaign. Let's talk about steadiness of the long term relations. Not small DISAGREEMENTS between ALLIES.