National Post (National Edition)
Senator's defence of China is ridiculous
Folks, I need a little editorial help: What's the opposite of virtue signalling? I ask having logged some time in the study of the Hon. Yuen Pau Woo's remarkable address to the Senate, which was delivered Monday and is now being discussed in the newspapers as much as any piece of Canadian oratory in the Trudeau II era. Sen. Woo is the “facilitator” (i.e., the leader) of the Independent Senators Group, the single largest caucus in our semi-reformed, semi-non-partisan Senate. The Singaporean-Canadian Woo is making headlines for his rejoinder to a motion, originally made by Conservative Sen. Leo Housakos, on communist China's disgusting oppression of its Uyghur minority.
The Housakos motion was what Woo derides as a “labelling” gesture. It asserts that Chinese actions to destroy Uyghur culture through forced re-education, political detentions, and anti-fertility measures are consistent with the UN definition of genocide, and it asks the House of Commons to urge the transfer of the 2022 Winter Olympics. Sen. Woo protests that he agrees with the crux of the motion; although he seems a little reluctant to sling the word “genocide” around, he attests that:
“If the point of this motion is to remind us that the (People's Republic of China) is an illiberal, authoritarian state, I have a news flash for you: The PRC has been an illiberal authoritarian state since its founding over 70 years ago. Without minimizing any of the repressive — perhaps even genocidal — acts against Uyghurs in recent years, the accusations against the Chinese government — forced relocation, demolition of traditional homes and ways of living, coercive birth control, mandatory re-education, suppression of individual rights — are as old as the PRC itself.”
Having said this, the senator dives into a satchel of talking points to come up with every half-baked reason he can find for the Senate not to express opposition to this kind of thing. It goes without saying that Canada's own track record with regard to its Aboriginal peoples is cited — in the 20th century the Dominion perpetrated every crime in the foregoing paragraph against them. Woo proposes that our foreign-policy approach to China should set aside the unstated premise of our systemic political superiority, for, after all, the Chinese people believe their own country to be “democratic.” We should instead approach them as a moral equal that has learned through sad experience that high-modernist projects for racial assimilation don't work.
This isn't a bad idea! Indeed, it's probably terrific advice for Canadian diplomats to bear in mind when they're engaged in personal dialogue with their mainland Chinese peers. The problem with the speech is only everything else in it. You might say that it is precisely the place of our legislators, as opposed to our diplomatic corps, to express political principles in the name of the Canadian people. Woo is having none of that, complaining that foreign policy is the prerogative of the Canadian executive and that any interference by democratic assemblies, even on the level of mere “labelling”, is an illegitimate “distraction.”
Woo will be denounced as a puppet of China by some who peruse his speech, but this honestly looks more like an attempt to import the Singaporean theory of government into Canada tariff-free. Here in Canada, Woo says, we “rightly” define democracy with reference to the “input legitimacy” of our representative bodies. We think we're democratic because we have elections (how cute), and we think we're liberal because we have justiciable enumerated rights (so adorable!), and we think that democratic and liberal are good things to be.
But this is only one perspective among many! “Like most of you,” Woo says, “I was brought up in the orthodoxy that input democracy through free and fair elections will, in the long run, outperform because citizens can always vote out a government that has not performed, and, in that way, seek to improve outputs by changing the inputs.”
You might be asking “And?” at this point, but the senator is here to tell you that not only are these preferences mere matters of taste, but that democracy has failed outright. “Sure, there has been economic growth,” sneers Woo, “but income and wealth inequality have increased, with stagnating median incomes and growing societal tension.” He warns of the consequent rise of “populist leaders who have illiberal instincts,” although it is not left clear on what basis he can object to this, any more than he seems capable of criticizing communism (a word mysteriously absent from the speech).
“Let me be clear,” Woo then says, as if realizing that he was straying from ground that his fellow Independent senators would be willing to occupy alongside their “facilitator.” “I much prefer the vagaries of democratic choice to the certainty of authoritarian rule, but we cannot be smug about our preference for input legitimacy as the only way to validate state power.”
It should be observed here that the text of Housakos's motion didn't present any explicit challenge to the “validity” or the legitimacy of the mainland Chinese state. It's a protest against particular actions by that state. It is only Sen. Woo's interpretation that raises any question of the legitimacy of communist government in China.
So what criticism of the People's Republic would not be “smug” under this sort of pseudo-intellectual analysis? Can the word “China” properly be uttered on the floor of either house of Canada's Parliament without inviting vaporous accusations of semantic hegemony or obtrusion onto the royal prerogative? Woo says he's trying to “be clear,” but I don't find his answers to these questions easy to perceive at all.
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