Chris Elder served twice in the New Zealand Embassy in Beijing, first in the 1970s when it was still Peking, and most recently as ambassador in 1993–97. He is the author of Interesting Times: Some New Zealanders in Republican China (2024) and editor of New Zealand's China Experience: Its Genesis, Triumphs, and Occasional Moments of Less Than Complete Success and Forty Years On: New Zealand–China Relations Then, Now and in the Years to Come, as well as two literary anthologies: Old Peking: City of the Ruler of the World and China's Treaty Ports: Half Love and Half Hate.
