The Huawei affair is so important. It has brought Canada face to face with the reality that we do not have compatible values with the Chinese Communist Party. It’s been a long time coming.
Journalist Jonathan Manthorpe, author of Claws of the Panda
Claws of the Panda Jonathan Manthorpe Cormorant Books
“China has no rule of law as it is understood in Western liberal democracies; the judicial system in China works to the benefit of the government only. A criminal in China is someone the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) says is a criminal.”
Canadian journalist Jonathan Manthorpe wrote these chilling words months before Canada’s Chinese nightmare had begun. But they have proved dismayingly prescient. By the time the book containing them was published earlier this year, their harsh truths were coming into full, frightening relief.
“The Chinese Communist Party has now decided to throw off the camouflage and forget about the smiles and show us the teeth,” Manthorpe says. His bestselling new book, Claws of the Panda, shows why this is happening. It has just received its third printing in less than a year, and its contents have assumed an unsettling relevance, given China’s uncivilized response to Canada’s arrest last December of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou for possible extradition to the U.S.
Manthorpe, for many years a veteran foreign correspondent for Canada’s Southam (now Postmedia) newspapers, isn’t surprised by the way the Chinese Communist Party has retaliated in detaining two Canadians, Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, on the grounds that they are national security threats. But he hopes that the Huawei crisis has aroused Canadians to the fact that China, under its Communist dictators, has no rule of law as we know it.
“Their first instinct is to take hostages, so we have the two Michaels being held hostage for six months, being tortured daily with sleep deprivation, being interrogated daily, and now being charged essentially with espionage — with threatening the national security of China,” Manthorpe says by phone from his Vancouver Island home. And he warns of even worse things ahead for the two detained Canadians.
“They’re clearly being softened up for televised confessions and then a sort of show trial and probably heavy prison sentences. This is quite disgusting, and I hope that what is being done to the two Michaels clearly reinforces in Canadian people’s minds — especially politicians, business people and academics — that this is not a regime we can deal with in any normal way.
“This is why the Huawei affair is so important. It has brought Canada face to face with the reality that we do not have compatible values with the Chinese Communist Party. It’s been a long time coming.”
So at the very least Manthorpe hopes that this unhappy affair “will force, or ought to force our political, official, business, academic and media sectors to really examine our relationship with the Chinese Communist Party and realize we have to be a lot more cautious in the future.”
And he suggests the current federal government has been “extraordinarily naive” in its dealings with China — especially under Xi Jinping, who had come to power in 2012.
So, among other things, Claws of the Panda is a wake-up call. Published by Cormorant, it carries an explosive subtitle: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada. And it comes with advance endorsements from major heavyweights.
David Mulroney, former Canadian ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, says that “Manthorpe’s account of China’s clandestine efforts to influence people and politics in Canada is as compelling as it is disturbing.”
And former Canadian senator and Conservative power-broker Hugh Segal calls it “a much-needed exposure of the Chinese Communist Party’s step-by-step engagement throughout the world to advance its own economic, political and strategic interests at the expense of other countries’ sovereignty, security and economic well-being.”
Manthorpe says his book is the product of “accumulated knowledge and experience over the years.” And he says the warning signals have been present for decades. He cites 1960s academic Paul Lin, a major player from the past, as “an essential character in the whole planting of agents of influence in all branches of Canadian life.”
Another early apologist for the Chinese Communist Party was Canadian missionary James Endicott. Manthorpe argues both men were “essentially agents of influence” under the direction of Zhou Enlai, Communist China’s head of government from 1949 to 1976 — “assigned to Canada, which Zhou saw as a fertile ground for his kind of diplomacy and for wider infiltration into North America.”
Manthorpe’s eyes were opened further when he took over the Southam News Asian bureau in Hong Kong in 1993 and began travelling widely in China.
“I began to get a very quick and thorough education in the way the Chinese Communist Party operated,” says Manthorpe who was in that post during major events, including the British handover of its Hong Kong colony to the Chinese in 1997. He found himself increasingly disturbed by the role being played outside China’s borders by a shadowy Communist organization called the United Front.
When Manthorpe returned to Canada in 1998, he quickly became aware of United Front infiltration of Canadian institutions. One flagrant example was the Chinese Communist Party’s determination to gain control of Chinese-language media in Canada. However, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was also starting to worry — it authorized online publication of a warning about the extent of United Front operations in Canada.
Manthorpe has a lot to say about the United Front in his book and its intimidation of Chinese Canadians. “One of the messages they have given me constantly is this. We are under daily pressure from agents of the Chinese Communist Party, mostly through United Front operations. Can you please try to get the message to mainstream Canada that we need help in pushing back.”
Manthorpe hopes readers of the book will finally understand that Canadian citizens of Chinese heritage are “under siege because the Chinese Communist Party regards them as a resource to be controlled and used.”
However, the threats to this country are multi-faceted. For example, Manthorpe remains troubled by unresolved issues surrounding the immigration scandals that tarnished the reputation of Hong Kong’s Canadian consulate during the 1990s. “The logic of the whole progression of events for several years was that the RCMP was complicit in covering up pretty massive corruption in the consulate,” he says.
So, did Beijing play a role in this? Manthorpe is forthright in his answer: “If you look at the whole history of relations between the Canadian government and the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, it is to do essentially what Beijing wants. It’s to make us look uncritically at the relationship — which is why I use the phrase ‘self-delusion’ so many times.
“Our relationship with this regime in Beijing has been delusional for 60 to 70 years, in part because if our own naiveté in part because of their infiltration here.”
He admits he could instead have called the book Supping with the Devil.
“We have done that, and we’ve paid the price for it,” he says. “My hope is that this whole Huawei affair will contribute to a new sense of realism in our relationship with China. We can’t pull back — China is going to be the largest economy in the world very shortly. We can’t avoid that, but we need to have a much more realistic view of what’s in it for Canada.”
Fearful of causing “social discord,” he proceeded cautiously in writing Claws of the Panda.
“I was very much afraid that this book might cause an up-swelling of feelings against Chinese Canadians or Canadians of Chinese heritage,” he says. “This concerned me very much, and I went through a lot of debate with myself over whether I should write the book.
“I knew I would have to make clear to all readers that it’s not a book about Canadians of Chinese heritage. It’s about a particular political party in China and its attempts to expand its power.”
If you look at the whole history of relations between the Canadian government and the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing, it is to do essentially what Beijing wants.
Jonathan Manthorpe