Whose side are we on?

Diversity as the engine of invention, unbridled optimism in the genius of entrepreneurship, ambitious leadership, ladders of opportunity for everyone and everything getting better all the time. Such was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s elucidation of Canada’s bright new brand at the opening of the World Economic Forum in Davos this week.

It’s a heck of a marketing exercise, but the litmus test of whether there is anything genuine about Trudeau’s commitment to these formulae for global economic development, foreign trade and international relations should be expected to come sooner than he would like, and from an especially awkward quarter.

Whatever their happy claims, the Liberals’ first priority in these matters has long been the sordid business of entrenching ever-deeper intimacies with the brutal state-capitalist regime in Beijing — the antithesis of the bright and bubbly economic and political model Trudeau purports to champion. And just as talk of a free trade deal with China is heating up, a youthful, optimistic and democratic revolt that would be the envy of any selfrespecting liberal has swept away the old Beijing- friendly order in Taiwan, which China claims as its sovereign possession.

It has been a long time coming, but last weekend Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for the first time captured the presidency and an overwhelming majority in Taiwan’s legislature, sweeping away the pro- Beijing Kuomintang (KMT) in a rout that also carried several novice left-leaning politicians to power.

Things could get very embarrassing, very soon. On any number of contentious fronts, Canada might be required — heaven forbid — to take sides. Already, Beijing is demanding assurances from Ottawa that Canada will mind its manners and refrain from becoming too friendly with Taiwan’s new government.

Tsai Ing- wen, Taiwan’s president-elect (and the first woman to be elected to the office), has made it plain that the last thing she wants is a fight with Beijing. Tsai is certainly not asking Canadians, or anyone else, to abandon the international community’s diplomatic fiction that Taiwan isn’t a real country, nor is she asking that Taiwan’s scores of trade offices around the world be converted to fullfledged embassies in defiance of Beijing. But if push comes to shove, whose side will Canada be on?

Just days before the KMT’s ouster, Canada concluded a relatively minor trade deal with Taiwan, more than a decade in the making, that will eliminate the distortion of double- taxation in commerce. Beijing responded by warning Canada that it will not tolerate any formal Ottawa-Taipei trade agreements. With the DPP now in power, Taiwan is expected to accelerate its appeals for Canada’s support for its bid to join the 12-member TransPacific Partnership agreement. Beijing adamantly opposes Taiwan’s entry into the TPP, insisting that China should be admitted instead, and Taiwan should only be considered at some possible later date.

“If I were sitting in Washington or Tokyo, I’d be a bit nervous about the Liberals in Canada right now,” Scott Simon, research chair in Taiwan studies at the University of Ottawa, told me this week. “The only comfort is that Canada is a small country and is likely to play a small role anyway. But you can bet that Tokyo and Washington will be nervous about anything happening right now that strengthens China’s hand.”

The proximate origin of Taiwan’s democratic breakthrough was the March 2014 eruption of the Sunflower Movement, which brought 100,000 people i nto the streets and rallied students to occupy Taiwan’s legislature. The notoriously authoritarian KMT dispatched riot squads to shut it all down. The Sunflower protests were sparked by precisely the kind of trade deals that the Liberals and Canada’s China business lobby constantly badgered former prime minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government to conclude with Beijing — and which he eventually and obligingly did. But the Canada- China free trade deal that is now all the rage in Liberal circles must undo Harper’s minor restraints and allow China’s state-owned enterprises free reign in Canada, Beijing insists. Trudeau has already made plain that he’s just fine with that.

Where things get very odd in making sense of Taiwan’s politics is that the Chinese Communist Party and the KMT were arch- enemies from the days of China’s war of liberation from Japan and the subsequent communist revolution ( or counterrevolution, if you prefer) in the late 1940s. But when the Communists mutated into princeling billionaires, it was all kissy-kissy with the KMT.

Where things get odd in Canadian politics is that the wave that swept Tsai Ingwen to electoral victory last weekend is made up of the same activist politics that animate Canadian Liberals: women’s rights, indigenous peoples’ rights, environmental sustainability, same- sex marriage, economic equality and social justice — and a broad consensus across Taiwan’s political spectrum that Beijing is a bully. In any other circumstance, l ast weekend’s DPP victory at the polls would be cause for celebration among genuine Canadian liberals — the DPP is a sister organization to Trudeau’s party in the Liberal International organization, after all.

But it isn’t a happy moment. It ’s an i nconven- ience. Compared to the U.S. State Department and the Japanese foreign office, World Affairs Canada issued a subtly muted response to last weekend’s DPP victory in Taiwan: Washington and Tokyo congratulated the DPP on its triumph; Ottawa merely congratulated the people of Taiwan for having participated in an election.

In Hong Kong, the prodemocracy “Umbrella Movement” is jubilant. It was only a few months after the “Sunflower” protests in Taiwan that young Hong Kongers rose up to protest Beijing’s growing economic and political subterfuge and its interference in the democratic affairs of Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region. The DPP victory is being heralded as a triumph of democracy and a milestone in the fight against inequality.

But on the Chinese mainland, it’ s hard to assess the popular response — or whether there even is one — owing to the regime’s exertions in censoring news coming in and out of China. Beijing’s cyber-police and press regulators are going to extraordinary lengths to keep the Chinese people in the dark about what has happened in Taiwan. The regime’s censors ordered online media not to send reporters to Taiwan to cover the elections, banned live coverage and ordered that Taiwanese flags and placards with pro-sovereignty slogans be blurred out in television broadcasts.

China’s Xi Jinping is a slippery and mercurial strongman-president, so there’s no telling how he might respond to what is clearly a serious popular rebuke, but it should not be expected to go unpunished. “The people of Taiwan have sent a very clear message that they’re not part of China and they don’t want to be part of China,” the University of Ottawa’s Scott Simon said. “The young people in Taiwan, particularly, say they don’t want be part of China at all.”

The same, it would seem, cannot quite be said of Canada’s youthful, optimistic, democracy- praising, diversity-loving Liberals.