Canada beware: What China really wants from free trade.

Last week China pulled off the incredible feat of landing a science probe on the far side of the moon. It is a testament to China’s new prowess as an advanced technological nation. At the same time, China’s president-as-longas-he wants-it Xi Jinping extolled his military to prepare for war as he threatened that China’s reunion with Taiwan is inevitable, even by force if necessary.

There is hardly a week that some new major measure is not announced by China. These include the “belt and road” initiative to connect China to Europe using rail and road transportation; a high level of foreign aid that now brings Chinese engineers and construction workers, as well as billions of Chinese Yuan, to nations in Africa, South America and Asia; the Chinese navy’s participation in anti-piracy patrols off the Horn of Africa and its harassment of U.S. naval vessels in the South China Sea; an initiative to build a railroad in Kenya from the interior of that nation to the Port of Mombasa to speed Chinese trade from there to the Chinese mainland; Chinese initiatives to build a railway through Myanmar, to add to an oil and a gas pipeline connecting China to the port of Kyaukpyu on the Bay of Bengal, thus allowing Chinese commercial traffic to bypass the Malacca Straight chokepoint; the establishment and expansion of a freight and naval base in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa and the possible establishment of a second base possibly in Namibia; the building and expansion of reefs into island bases in the waters of the South China Sea; and free trade treaties with nations such as Australia. No doubt more such developments will be announced in the near future.

These initiatives show China attempting to reverse the impact of geopolitics on that country. China is after all, a land-bound nation with a single coastline that faces at least two island chains of non- or anti-communist nations such as Taiwan, Japan and the Philippines as it looks eastwards across the Pacific. It is also still challenged by a United States Navy based at Sasebo in Japan and regular U.S. patrols both the South China Sea and East China Sea. What China is doing, therefore, is to use land-based solutions to reach westward to the Bay of Bengal and the Indian Ocean, and southwestward to Africa while tying up smaller nations with loans that presumably bring political and economic pressure to bear on their relations to China.

With all the talk of working within the international system, ending the current trade war with the United States and making peaceful arrangements through the International Trade Organization, China’s long-term goal is not to achieve some sort of parity as a superpower, but to dominate as much of the globe as possible using any means short of war to do so, including so-called free trade agreements.

China is governed by the relatively small clique we all know as the Communist Party. It is debatable how communist the party is today. Looking at its accomplishments and its method of dealing with other countries it is pretty clear that the Party combines good old-fashioned Chinese nationalism, state control of key industries, centralized military power, totalitarian methods and a massive state security apparatus to control its population and position itself in the world.

In the race to develop artificial intelligence in such areas as face recognition software, for example, it is far ahead of any potential rivals. It recently used this capacity to identify a single individual wanted for state crimes from a crowd of some 60,000 persons at a soccer match.

To put things more simply, what China wants — and is prepared to use all elements of state power to achieve — is dominance, not accommodation.

How aware is Canada’s current government of the pitfalls of trying to snuggle up to China as a policy of broadening out Canada’s trade opportunities? To what extent has the Canadian government attempted to discern how China’s free-trade agreements are affecting the economies and the politics of other countries? Of course those of us outside government circles can’t know, but what we can see is that making deals with a nation that will play by accepted rules of international behaviour when it believes it is in its interests to do so, and break away from those rules when it does not, is like trying to make partnership agreements with the Mafia.

Hopefully the Trudeau government keeps these unsettling facts in mind as it continues to pursue an agreement with the Communist masters in Beijing.

TRUDEAU IS AS CULPABLE AS ANYONE — AND MORE SO THAN MANY. — MCPARLAND

CHINA ... IS PREPARED TO USE ALL ELEMENTS OF STATE POWER.