New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters angered China’s ambassador to Wellington on Thursday after telling a Chinese-born member of Parliament to “go back to your country” during a parliamentary debate about the COVID-19 pandemic.

Green Party MP Lawrence Xu-Nan, who was born in the Chinese city of Tianjin and raised in Auckland, asked Peters, the leader of the New Zealand First party, whether he had received the COVID-19 vaccine.

Peters responded by saying that the MP had “only arrived here five minutes ago.”

“Go back to your country. They lie shamelessly there, but they do not lie like that here,” Peters said. “This is called democracy, unlike what you are used to. Go back to where you came from, you loudmouth.”

The remarks prompted a rare intervention from China’s ambassador to New Zealand, Wang Xiaolong, who said on X on Thursday that he generally preferred not to interfere in domestic politics.

“However, suffice it to say that some remarks reveal far more about the person making them than about anything or anyone else,” Wang wrote.

Peters quickly responded to the ambassador, saying that his comments had “proved my point.”

“We live in a democracy that includes freedom of expression and rights—values that some countries restrict and even suppress by force,” Peters wrote on X.

This is not the first time Peters and his party have faced criticism over remarks described as racist.