A Chinese emperor’s brash new clothes

As if one, hard-headed, unpredictable and frighteningly powerful foreign president wasn’t enough for Canada to cope with these days, it should brace itself for another.

The Nafta-bashing, tariff-loving U.S. President Donald Trump has upended relations between his country and ours, prompting the Trudeau government to search for new friends and economic partners — partners such as China.

But as China sprints from autocracy to dictatorship and paves the way for President Xi Jinping to become its 21st century emperor, Canada’s strategy looks as promising as jumping from a frying pan into a pot of boiling oil.

On Sunday, China’s National People’s Congress voted to change the country’s constitution to remove term limits. That means Xi will be president — and let’s be honest, dictator — for life, or as long as he wants.

When this happens Xi, who seems destined to be head of state, the Communist party and the military, will be the world’s most powerful person.

This is a profound and distressing change in direction for the world’s most populous nation and second biggest economy.

It brings to an end more than four decades in which China not only made enormous and welcome economic strides, but seemed to have abandoned the authoritarian era of Mao Zedong, whose one-man rule led to the deaths of millions of Chinese and the brutal repression of millions of others.

It kills the hopes of prosperous, Western democracies such as Canada that engaging with China, trading with it and welcoming it into the global order that included the World Trade Organization, would pay dividends to all.

In time, China would embrace the values the West has assumed are universal. The Chinese people would be freer and able to elect their leaders who would, in turn, be subject to the rule of law. So the theory went.

The rise of Xi shows the magnitude of the West’s miscalculation.

Dissent is being crushed. Potential rivals have been purged. Critics are imprisoned. The People’s Liberation Army has been rearranged to serve Xi. And armed with new electronic technologies, the state has become Orwell’s Big Brother, ever watchful, ever listening for signs of disagreement.

Meanwhile, China is expanding its military and demanding the world recognize it as Southeast Asia’s supreme power.

It cannot be business as usual with China. But neither are rejection or confrontation options.

To be sure, the trading relationship Canada has built with China over decades will and should continue.

But the federal government must rethink its policy on China.

How can the Liberals, with their commitment to individual liberty as well as human and labour rights, pursue a free-trade deal with a China that considers such principles to be alien, Western imperialist affectations?

And what are the long-term implications of the Chinese buying up more Canadian natural resources and businesses?

Whatever Prime Minister Justin Trudeau thinks of America’s president, Trump will be gone in 2021, 2025 at the latest.

Xi could be China’s dictator when Trudeau starts collecting his political pension.