Appeasing Beijing’s bullies is a failing

I have been so concerned of late about the threat to democracy and the rule of law and just plain human decency that Donald Trump and his more right-wing supporters pose that I had come to think of left-wing ideologues as a handful of silly, irrelevant people that we need not be concerned with.

John Ivison's article disabused me of that notion.

However, as Winston Churchill pointed out, the far left and the far right differ from each other “no more than the North Pole does from the south.”

That China's authoritarian government collectively behaves like a cruel bully is beyond argument. Its treatment of the Uighurs has been not unjustly termed a form of genocide.

If an ordinary Canadian citizen or business person applies for a loan to a bank or private investor and tells a meaningful lie in order to get the loan, they commit a crime.

Being a Huawei executive should not excuse that behaviour. I do have concerns over Trump's comment to the effect that he might use Meng Wanzhou as a bargaining chip, but even if she is extradited, she almost certainly will not suffer anywhere near as great a penalty as the “two Michaels” (Kovrig and Spavor) have already suffered, and they have done nothing wrong.

When Duff Cooper resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty following the Munich Accord, he said of then-prime minister Neville Chamberlain that he “has believed in addressing Herr Hitler through the language of sweet reasonableness. I have believed that he was more open to the language of the mailed fist.”

Perhaps we do not want to get to the language of the mailed fist just yet, but attempting to appease bullies has always been a failed strategy, and China has become an international bully.

Bruce F. Simpson, Ottawa