Canada has allies in fight with China

Progress can be made if Liberals choose to act

When China began playing hardball with us following the RCMP’s arrest of Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Chinese telecom giant Huawei, Canada was at a clear disadvantage. The arrests of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, who have now been held for 530 days, on trumped-up charges, and China’s restrictions on the import of numerous Canadian products, showed how little influence we had.

Indeed, China outclasses us in almost every measure — from the size of its economy to its power on the international stage. At the time, even U.S. President Donald Trump expressed his willingness to side with the communists over his own Justice Department and his country’s closest ally, using Canada as a pawn in his bid to forge a new trade relationship with China.

The tables have turned. China has become an international pariah, largely due to its handling of the coronavirus crisis, which started in the city of Wuhan.

China’s misdeeds are numerous and have been widely reported, but it’s worth recalling some of the actions the Communist party has taken that have served to exacerbate this crisis.

Despite promising to be more transparent after getting caught trying to cover up the SARS epidemic, and being praised for its openness at the start of this current outbreak, we now know that China initially tried to hide the novel coronavirus from the rest of the world. It silenced the doctor who tried to warn others about the virus as far back as November. It exerts far too much influence over the World Health Organization, which spent months praising China’s response, while ignoring Taiwan’s warnings. It outright lied about the fact that there was person-to-person transmission of the virus and continued to allow international flights out of the country, which allowed the disease to turn into the pandemic that has derailed the global economy and killed hundreds of thousands. It has kicked out foreign journalists for reporting the truth, while promoting conspiracy theories that lay the blame on others. And there is a growing consensus that it has seriously under-reported the extent of the outbreak within its borders.

None of this has gone unnoticed by Trump. Though he has flip-flopped on China a number of times — he has called Chinese President Xi Jinping a “friend” and initially praised the country’s response — his administration is now engaged in a high-stakes war of words with the Chinese, and is taking concrete steps that are provoking the “Sleeping Giant.”

On Wednesday, high-level American officials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, sent a message congratulating Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on the beginning of her second term in office, which is a rare move considering the sensitive diplomatic nature of Taiwan.

That same day, the U.S. approved the sale of US$180 million ($251 million) worth of torpedoes to the island nation, which China considers part of its own territory. That came after Beijing tried to use the pandemic as cover to step up its harassment and intimidation campaign against Taipei.

There has also been increased military activity in and around the Taiwan Strait in recent months, with China sending warships, an aircraft carrier and fighter jets into the area, and the U.S. deploying a destroyer and conducting large-scale surveillance operations off China’s coast.

And it is not only America and Taiwan that the People’s Liberation Army has to worry about: skirmishes along the Chinese-Indian border have increased to the highest level since 2015, according to Indian officials, and talks aimed at lowering tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbours broke down on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, China is also involved in a diplomatic spat with Australia and seems to be going off the same playbook it used in its dispute with Canada. Canberra has led the charge for an international inquiry into Beijing’s handling of the pandemic, and successfully helped push the World Health Assembly to pass a motion to that effect earlier this week.

As punishment, Beijing banned the import of beef from several Australian processors, slapped large tariffs on Australian barley and reportedly told state-owned power plants to stop buying coal from the country.

It is clear that China’s authoritarian rulers have burned a lot of bridges as of late, and most of those bridges led straight to democratic countries that have historically been allies of ours. If ever there was a time for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government to abandon its passive tone and join the international community’s effort to contain China, it’s now.

We should start by banning Huawei from contributing to our 5G infrastructure. We should improve our trading relationships with our democratic allies, forge new free trade agreements and press for Taiwan to be included in the Trans-Pacific Partnership. This will leave us less dependent on Chinese imports and less susceptible to tariffs imposed on our exports. Instead of pursuing a Security Council seat, we should be using our clout to try to get Taiwan included in international bodies and pushing for a thorough investigation of China’s actions over the course of this pandemic.

With our democratic allies lined up alongside us, this is Ottawa’s opportunity to actually make some headway in its long-simmering dispute with Beijing. All the Liberals have to do is seize it.

CHINA’S ... RULERS HAVE BURNED A LOT OF BRIDGES AS OF LATE.