China not impervious to sustained political pressure
When two Canadians are unjustly incarcerated in China, it perhaps becomes easier to feel empathy for the entire Uighur people held hostage in remote Xinjiang.
Perhaps the suffering of the few helps puts the focus on the many. If not for our Two Michaels — career diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor — being ransomed for the past two years by China’s new “hostage diplomacy,” Canada might well have been more diplomatic and less declarative about allegations of genocide against the Uighurs.
Possibly the peril of so many Canadians living in Hong Kong has also opened our eyes. When 300,000 fellow citizens are warned by Beijing to show patriotic fidelity to the Chinese motherland, without protection from their Canadian passports, it focuses the mind.
Against that backdrop, the House of Commons passed a symbolic motion of condemnation Monday over China’s genocidal treatment of minority Uighurs, who form a Muslim majority in the Xinjiang autonomous region. They were acting on repeated accounts from human rights monitors of mass detention in ideological re-education camps, slave labour, forced sterilization, state surveillance and religious repression.
The allegations are hard to ignore, even if our own ambassador to China, Dominic Barton, closed his eyes to the realities on the ground in his old job heading McKinsey & Co. Before he joined our diplomatic service, his consulting service held a sumptuous corporate retreat in Xinjiang province, not far from where Uighurs were being detained.
Diplomacy, like consulting, sometimes takes its time. And sees what it wants to see.
Politicians, too, find their own way in their own time. Outgoing U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo issued a belated
declaration of genocide only on the day before the Trump administration gave up office last month, after four years of deliberation.
It is a reflection of realpolitik that Pompeo felt too timid to attempt it earlier, for fear of antagonizing the Chinese. The new Biden administration has indicated it stands by the inherited declaration — too awkward to rescind it after being boxed in by its predecessors.
Canada’s Conservative foreign affairs critic, Michael Chong, is not so cynical a politician — he showed himself far more idealistic in leading the parliamentary campaign that culminated with Monday’s vote. But he benefited from the fact that the resolution is nonbinding — no change in government policy, because the Liberal cabinet abstained (though Liberal backbenchers backed it).
This isn’t the first time Canadian MPs have spoken out about genocide in Xinjiang. A Commons subcommittee on human rights made a similar declaration last fall, provoking
a furious response from China then, and again this week.
What’s interesting about the stronger Canadian response over the Two Michaels is how it compares to the incarceration of another Canadian citizen, Huseyin Celil, years before. Celil is a Uighur activist who was arrested during a family trip to Uzbekistan in 2006 and handed over to China in 2007, where he was convicted on vague terrorism charges and sentenced to life imprisonment in a trial denounced by Canada.
When I returned from the Toronto Star’s Asia Bureau in 2005 to become a newsroom editor, I oversaw our coverage of Celil’s plight, so it feels personal to me all these years later. In truth, there wasn’t much Canada could do at the time, nor is there a great deal we can do now — either for Celil or the Two Michaels — beyond taking measures to avoid importation of products made with slave labour.
That might make us feel better, but it won’t change anything for the better. Any sanctions would amount to a
rounding error for China’s unstoppable economic juggernaut.
Equally, we are powerless to restrain China’s increasingly reckless behaviour in Hong Kong, which is not a genocide but a kind of political suicide — destroying the crucible of democracy that could have acted as a transitional force as the mainland modernizes. There too, I feel a personal stake watching the fate of two aging pro-democracy activists — newspaper publisher Jimmy Lai and former opposition leader Martin Lee — whom I got to know while in Hong Kong.
They both face punitive legal actions, persecution masquerading as prosecution, now that Beijing has imposed its own draconian national security laws on the supposedly autonomous former British crown colony handed over in 1997. These two Hong Kong leaders, along with the 300,000 Canadian passport-holders living there, also make it personal.
China is an increasingly dominant force, with whom we are enmeshed economically in supply chains and trading relationships whether we like it or not — from medical masks to mining resources. We couldn’t decouple if we wanted to, nor would the rest of the world, and so we must somehow cohabit without collaborating.
Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, Bob Rae, told our Ryerson Democracy Forum last month about his pro forma public scolding by the Chinese (after the previous genocide declaration by MPs), and the private diplomacy that continues. China under President Xi Jinping is not only different from the more modulated China of previous years, it is also dramatically different from our previous adversaries, Rae noted.
The old Soviet Union posed a military threat that camouflaged its economic weakness; by contrast, China is both a rising military and economic superpower. Where once the world could unite against apartheid South Africa by imposing virtually global economic sanctions in the 1980s that suffocated its highly vulnerable market economy, China is impregnable by comparison.
We wield no such leverage today because Beijing dominates and dictates the terms of trade. It is not dependent on foreign borrowings, for it is in fact the world’s biggest creditor, even if it acts discreditably.
China’s might makes it invulnerable, but its pride does not leave it impervious to sustained and strategic political pressure. This week’s parliamentary resolution is a sensible first step, but won’t get us very far.
To make strides, we need to move in lockstep with other countries who share our sensibilities — and vulnerabilities — while understanding that we cannot bring an economic superpower to heel. There can be no military or even economic confrontation, but political containment — multilateral, not unilateral — is the way forward.