SEEING THE REAL CHINA
In the ongoing tumult arising from the December arrest of Huawei’s Meng Wanzhou, a kind of consensus has emerged in foreign-policy circles that unites both the greasy business-class wise guys whose years of disastrous counsel left Canada so dangerously exposed to Beijing’s bullying in the first place, and the more steely-eyed China observers whose warnings, for at least as many years, have gone unheeded.
The sum of the agreement goes something like this. With the possible exception of the 1989 slaughters that crushed a peaceful democratic uprising in China, culminating in the massacres of Tiananmen Square, Wanzhou’s arrest on a months-old U.S. Justice Department extradition request related to fraud and Iran sanctions-dodging charges has caused Canada-China relations to plummet to a point without precedent since the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau opened diplomatic relations with Beijing in October 1970.
The thing to keep your eye on is how Justin Trudeau’s government comes down on the pivotal point of disagreement over what to do about it.
One view is that Canada’s primary objective must be to get relations with China “back on track,” and in the meantime, all steps should be taken to ensure that Canada’s corporate class remains untroubled by the unpleasantness. This standpoint is deeply embedded within the Liberal party establishment, a comfortably tenured cohort within Global Affairs Canada, the Canada-China Business Council, the Business Council of Canada and a passel of over-rated academics.
The opposing view holds that Beijing’s retaliatory abduction and imprisonment of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, the death sentence handed down in the case of Robert Schellenberg, and the persistent stream of vulgar threats of further retaliation emanating from Beijing, should be taken as a historic opportunity. It’s a welcome occasion to get real, to face up to the growing threat that Xi Jinping’s regime poses to the world’s democracies, and to finally jettison Canada’s uniquely slavish and “sunny ways” attitude about relations with Beijing.
This is the standpoint of Canada’s intelligence community, our partners in the “Five Eyes” intelligence and national security agencies, international human rights organizations, Chinese-Canadian democracy activists, and a community of independent and uncompromised Canadian academics and China observers who, unlike their comfortably situated opposite numbers, enjoy the benefit of not having been consistently and catastrophically wrong about everything that has mattered about China for nearly a half a century.
From the outset of his emergence on the national scene, Prime Minister Trudeau had happily accepted the warm embrace of Canada’s China business lobby, and his enthusiasms have not gone unrequited. From his appointment of Peter Harder of the Canada-China Business Council to lead his transition team — Harder is now Trudeau’s point man in the Senate — to his private cash-for-access fundraisers with Chinese billionaires, Trudeau had been Beijing’s hands-down favourite among G7 leaders.
It was a distinctly Canadian kind of in-plain-sight sordidness that was championed by Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien, whose seamless 2003 career switch to Chinese corporate fixer was immediate upon his departure from federal office. It came as second nature to the spineless Stéphane Dion, Trudeau’s first foreign affairs minister, and to John McCallum, the perpetually grinning cabinet minister who saw nothing untoward about taking $73,000 in free trips to China while serving as an MP, and then, as a cabinet minister, took it as a promotion when he was appointed ambassador to China in 2017.
But it is at the point in the story, when we come to Trudeau’s abrupt firing of McCallum last month, that Trudeau, and perhaps especially Dion’s successor, Chrystia Freeland, must be given credit. Trudeau’s government inherited a squalid, unprincipled China policy that was central to the Liberal party’s approach to foreign affairs. It was at least partly embraced, if somewhat reluctantly, by the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. Sadly, the New Democrats have been largely oafish and incoherent on the entire subject.
The way the story is usually told — the way a senior official in the prime minister’s office encouraged me to think of it — is that by essentially pleading Meng Wanzhou’s case, hoping out loud for some sort of sleazy backroom deal to save her, and by gleefully championing the “we need to get things back on track” side of the debate, McCallum had gone “off the reservation.” And not once, but twice.
Well, sort of.
Another way of looking at it is that events have forced Trudeau and Freeland to go off-script, to break with convention, and to finally abandon the silly “winwin” rhetoric about trade relations with China that has been so central to the Liberals’ foreign policy and trade policy. Here we are, only two years into the absurdly propagandistic “Golden Decade” in the Canada-China relationship, and the whole edifice is shattered. An entire generation of China consultancies and policy advisers have nothing left to do with themselves except show up on television talk panels to cling pathetically to what anyone with a lick of sense can see is an elaborate fiction, or to quietly hang their heads in embarrassment, shame and disgrace.
So, good for Trudeau and Freeland, then. So far, they’ve cleaved close to the “rule of law” line in the Meng Wanzhou case, and they’ve stuck to their guns, and whatever criticism one might make of the Canadian approach to foreign policy generally, it is facile and churlish to argue that Canada is now somehow alone in its estrangement from Xi Jinping’s increasingly repressive, outwardly brutal regime. It is similarly parochial in the extreme to imagine that this is all simply a matter of Canada getting caught up in a trade war between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping.
Justin Trudeau has been given a lashing by events beyond his control, and even though he should have seen it coming — China doesn’t see Canada as the coolest kid in class, and the Chinese Communist Party isn’t going to be impressed by Trudeau showing up on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine — Trudeau appears to have learned a lesson from it. Freeland has been given free rein to marshal support among like-minded countries. Coalition-building of that kind — like the Lima Group on Venezuela that Canada hosted in Ottawa this week — has got to be the new gold standard in foreign policy.
It is a lesson Freedom House, the Washington-based institution that monitors global trends in democracy, has been urging upon the democratic world for quite some time. In its latest, just-released annual report, Freedom House points out that 2018 is the 13th year in a row for democracy’s retreat around the world.
“Only a united front among the world’s democratic nations — and a defence of democracy as a universal right rather than the historical inheritance of a few Western societies — can roll back the world’s current authoritarian and anti-liberal trends,” the report points out.
That’s harder work than showing up at Davos with groovy socks on. What counts is whether Trudeau is up to it.
Trudeau has been given a lashing and ... appears to have learned a lesson from it.