The Dominant Narrative of the New Zealand–China Free Trade Agreement: Peripheral Evidence, Presumptive Tilt and Business Realities

New Zealand (NZ) was the first developed country to sign a free trade agreement with China. Afterwards, the NZ government crafted a narrative to encourage businesses to pursue opportunities there and in emerging Asia more generally to enact the enabling institutional change. Our study shows neoliberal free-trade rhetoric matched and thus likely confirmed businesses’ opportunity perceptions but often mismatched their capabilities and thus interests. Businesses sampled predictably lacked scale, scope and other resources to realise the opportunities they perceived. We argue government communications tilted businesses towards the simplifying presumption that substantial opportunities lay within fairly easy grasp. As a result, over-enactment in entering the Chinese market followed. We identify the construct of ‘peripheral evidence’ as propping up presumptive tilt here and generally – irrelevant but widely observable facts or well-accepted predictions and opinion inappropriately shifted to centre-stage. Such centring discourages critical discourse and displaces properly central considerations – here the fundamental obstacles of size, scale and resources. Our study contributes to constructivist institutionalism by showing the mechanisms and tangible risks of uncritical pro-enactment discourse after formal trade liberalisation.