Shrugging at China’s crimes
Wu Guijun is a furniture maker and independent union activist from the Diweixin Product Factory in Shenzhen, in southern China. Wu was arrested on May 23 on charges of “assembling a crowd to disturb social order” after workers at his factory staged a wildcat strike. Wu has not been heard from since.
The workers’ rights activist Kong Youping is still in prison in Liaoning Province after the Shenyang Intermediate People’s Court jailed him on Sept. 16, 2004. His crime: organizing an independent union and posting anti-corruption articles on the Internet.
Wang Wenming was a leader among the tens of thousands of workers who protested their summary firings by the state-owned Chongqing Grain Group in two years ago. Wang was arrested on Oct. 14, 2011 and sent to a labour camp. Last April, his wife reported that he had been in hospital for three months and had lost the ability to talk.
There is no particular reason why Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau would know the names Wu Guijin, Kong Youping or Wang Wenming. Neither would there be any reason to single out Trudeau here, except for a couple of things.
It happens to have been Trudeau who chose to be transgressively clever or charmingly provocative or whatever the hell he was thinking when he professed his weird “level of admiration” for the Chinese police state at that profoundly ill-advised “ladies night” fundraiser last Thursday in Toronto. Further, while Trudeau’s apparent frivolity spasm continues to be the subject of elaborate excuse-making among the more zealous of his fan base and the object of mockery and schadenfreude among just about everybody else, there is an emerging notion about it all that is wholly wrong.
It is this business about Trudeau’s remarks constituting a “gaffe” of some kind, or an instance of a rookie politician “misspeaking” or merely musing unguardedly out loud. In fact, there is a very carefully considered “party line” of sorts at work here.
It’s about policy. Trudeau was more than just clumsy in articulating it, and to be fair it brings within its gruesome ambit more than just the Liberal party, but Justin Trudeau is its primary heir and successor. It is a sinister and unprincipled posture toward the regime in Beijing that arises from a well-travelled and spectacularly profitable Canada-China business nexus that has dominated part of the Liberal Party for quite some time.
The subject was alluded to only fleetingly last week when the New Democratic Party reminded everybody what Trudeau was saying last December when pollsters could find only about one in 10 Canadians who favoured the takeover of the oilsands firm Nexen by Beijing’s state-owned offshore acquisitions arm CNOOC.
Trudeau was alone among the party leaders in being positively giddy about the deal. In explaining his enthusiasm for a police-state enterprise becoming a major stakeholder in Canada’s energy sector, he allowed that he saw no difference between China and some Scandinavian country. Trudeau further conceded on CTV’s Question Period that his position on the CNOOC issue was at least partly because “obviously, my family has historical ties with China.”
These “family ties” began when Justin’s father, former prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, managed to banquet his way across China in his pre-politics days, in 1960, without much noticing a famine that was sweeping away the lives of at least 15 million people. A policy of profitably overlooking the oppression and plunder to which the Chinese masses are subjected was deeply entrenched by the time PET left the prime minister’s office.
Only a few weeks after Jean Chrétien said goodbye to the House of Commons, he was visiting China as a businessman and the esteemed guest of the Beijing-owned China International Trust and Investment Corporation. Chrétien’s sonin-law André Desmarais serves on the board of CITC Pacific Ltd., and Andre’s father, Paul Desmarais, was founding chairman of the CanadaChina Business Council. On and on it goes.
It is not as though no Conservative bigshots have followed the money trail to and from Beijing. But the Liberals built it, at the expense of ordinary Chinese people who are not allowed to vote, have no recourse to free speech, cannot join unions of their own choosing or bargain collectively. Surveillance and censorship and torture are systemic. The people are, not to put too fine a point on it, slaves.
That Canada-China trade freeway runs both ways. A censored 2011 study for the People’s Bank of China showed that since the mid-90s about $125 billion had been spirited out of the country by more than 16,000 emigrating party officials. Other studies reckon at least $50 billion a year is smuggled out of the country by the Communist Party’s princelings and their families. Another 2011 survey found that about 60 per cent of the rich Chinese were either in the process of emigrating or were planning to leave. Another study: nine of every 10 of the 300 Communist Party Central Committee members either had eligibility for citizenship elsewhere, either by recent family-member emigration or after having acquired foreign citizenship already.
This is what has been missed in the Great Ladies Night Imbroglio of 2013.
When Justin Trudeau tweets his hyperventilating protest that he “of all people” would never trade away “our” rights and freedoms, the rights and freedoms of the Chinese people count for nothing. This is not some “gaffe.” It’s policy, and no amount of melodramatic Twitter feeding should be allowed to hide that.