National Post (National Edition)
How to deal with the gangsters in Beijing
One day it’s the revelation of a vast cyberhacking operation run out of Beijing targeting military-value oceanographic technology research at more than two dozen universities in North America and Southeast Asia. The next day it’s a lurid story out of Florida about the operator of a chain of massage parlours whose intimate associations with U.S President Donald Trump and his inner circle are as numerous as her affiliations with a shadowy overseas influence-peddling and asset-recruitment operation run by the Chinese Communist Party.
It’s the big stuff, like this week’s revelation that Italy’s rickety and absurd left-right coalition government intends to break ranks with the European Union and sign on to Beijing’s $1-trillion Belt and Road debt-for-infrastructure loansharking racket. And it’s the constant background hum of lesser indecencies, like Mercedes-Benz apologizing to China for having posted an advertisement on Instagram that displayed one of its luxury cars alongside a quotation from Tibet’s spiritual leaderin-exile, the Dalai Lama.
What it all adds up to is an extraordinary juncture in the rise and fall of global powers, a major historical event that’s shaking the foundations of everything the world’s democracies have relied upon for peace and prosperity since the end of the Cold War. The formerly ascendant NATO powers are in disarray and retreat, convulsed by dysfunction, disunity, scandal and the weird reality-television circus act that continues to play out, non-stop, in the White House.
Chinese President Xi Jin- ping may have the crude instincts of a third-rate thug, but at least he knows what he wants. And he’s taking every advantage. Gone are the days of Deng Xiaoping’s cunning “hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead” strategy. After amassing to himself greater powers than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, Xi is setting China on a course to dominate the global economy. He has made it clear that he intends to do so in open defiance of the foundational rules that bind liberal democracies. And he will do so by coercion and intimidation, by deception or in plain sight. Xi will exploit our every weakness and overwhelm every unguarded flank.
“We must never follow the path of Western ‘constitutionalism,’ ‘separation of powers,’ and ‘judicial independence,’” Xi wrote last month in the Communist Party’s leading theoretical journal. At least he’s being straight up and forthright about it.
If Canada is ever to see an end to the hostage-taking standoff Xi set in motion when he chucked former diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor into the Ministry of State Security’s dungeons, it will not come about by the ordinary pursuits of diplomacy. We might as well face it. They may not be seeing freedom for a long, long time. Canada cannot allow itself to be paralyzed by this.
Kovrig and Spavor are only the first victims of Beijing’s retribution for Canada’s handling of the U.S Justice Department’s extradition request in the case of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou. The third victim was Robert Schellenberg, now facing a death sentence from a previously prosecut- ed drug-smuggling conviction. After Ottawa followed the ordinary course of the extradition process and ordered Meng’s case to proceed to formal hearings, Kovrig and Spavor were charged with spying. Beijing’s latest move is to cancel a major contract for Canadian canola seed, directly threatening $2 billion in export trade.
This should not be expected to let up, and it would be disastrous for Canada to give any impression of raising the white flag in the face of gangsterism of this kind.
It is only because of a distinctly Canadian sort of parochialism that the current predicament can be cast as merely a matter of being ensnared in the tangle of a trade conflict between the United States and China. It’s much, much bigger than that. China is currently engaged in several high-stakes confrontations with countries big and small all over the world, over everything from intellectual property theft to massive debt traps to cyber-spying, election-rigging and bribery.
In figuring out how Ottawa should respond to all this, it doesn’t help that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government is in crisis mode owing to the Snc-lavalin affair. Even worse, Canada finds itself at this crossroads burdened with the baggage of 30 years’ worth of official kowtowing, all dressed up as outwardlooking sophistication. This has been the defining feature of Canadian policy towards China: to embrace entanglements with the police state in Beijing as the cost of access to Chinese markets.
It’s worth remembering that in the days before he was turfed from his post as Canada’s ambassador to China in January, John McCallum’s idea of a defensive Canadian doomsday weapon in the standoff with Beijing was the threat of Trudeau putting in a telephone call to Xi Jinping. That would be “the last arrow in our quiver,” Mccallum said.
Perhaps we should be like the Swedes, then. It’s been more than three years since China abducted Gui Minhai, a Swedish publisher and co-owner of Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay Bookstore. Gui was one of several Hong Kong booksellers abducted by Beijing in 2015. In January 2016, Gui showed up on Chinese state television uttering an obviously forced confession involving something about a traffic accident he was supposed to have been involved in 15 years earlier. Sweden has grovelled and pleaded, to no avail. Neither Gui’s family, nor Swedish officials, have any idea where Gui is.
Australia provides a more useful example. While Canadian authorities only rarely review Chinese takeovers of Canadian firms, Australia’s foreign investment regulator now takes it for granted that even private Chinese companies are subject to Communist Party control — almost all major Chinese firms, including joint ventures and foreign firms operating in China, are required to install Communist Party committees in their decisionmaking structures. The result is that any Chinese takeover in Australia is subject to enhanced national-security screening.
Australia has also recently overhauled its laws governing national security and foreign interference with the aim of severely restraining Beijing’s influence-peddling and subversion. Similar laws in Canada are long overdue.
Whatever course Canada adopts, it has to be developed in consultation with fellow democracies — particularly the United States, in spite of the current president — and implemented in co-ordination with reliable, democratic partners. And it has to be a radical departure from all that has gone before.
XI IS SETTING CHINA ON A COURSE TO DOMINATE THE GLOBAL ECONOMY.