Business-minded China should be made to listen
The photograph of Michael Kovrig stretching out his body and kissing the ground when he arrived back in Canada seized me. How many times in tiny fetid Chinese prison cells did the two Michaels consider what they would do if they ever saw their own country again?
Hug family? Get vaccinated? Make a will, fix Mom’s eavestroughing, the kind of things you should always do, you know, just in case you’re taken hostage by a communist government that tried and failed to pass itself off as internationally and legally plausible, but who knew the world would suddenly go dark?
It is not clear to me how much Kovrig and Michael Spavor knew about how angry and worried Canadians were about their continuing ordeal. We spun through resentment of the U.S. for putting Canada in a wretched position, bewilderment about what Canada could do under the circumstances, and disgust for Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping and the system he runs.
The Chinese people deserve so much better, always have.
The two Michaels were kidnapped by a violent, lawless, and vengeful government and held as hostages to force the release of Meng Wanzhou, an executive at the huge technology company Huawei and, coincidentally, daughter of its founder.
Meng lived in extreme luxury in Vancouver while the two Michaels lived in filth and despair. Did that bother her? If it had, she would have begged her bossdad to ask Xi to release them, or give them library access, or have diplomatic visits, or perhaps live in a Beijing mansion and walk each day in its extensive gardens.
Instead, Meng would emerge from one of her mansions smiling, dressed in what I would described as Traditional Republican Wife status-anxiety apparel and get in her limousine to go to court.
It made me sad. Is this the Chinese dream under Xi, to reproduce the uncultured American elite displaying unearned wealth before millions of struggling poor people?
But communism has always been this way, its aim to offer membership, however fraught, to a misogynist party elite floating in luxury. This was the Soviet Union. It is Russia. This was Mao’s China and it’s the same now, even as China presents itself as a businessminded version of communism.
It isn’t. It’s the same old thing. You see it in Poland, in Hungary, in the wrecked African nations being bled dry by tyrants.
China has never been capitalist or even socialist, except in exporting cheap and badly made goods globally. China is not a country of laws and rules. It runs Uyghur concentration camps, its courts are terrorizing, it took hostages from many nations, it succeeded and it will take more hostages now.
China now claims releasing Canadian hostages had nothing whatsoever to do with Meng reaching a plea deal on American charges. Yes, and there was never any melamine in Chinese pet food exports.
We should join the other nations in the “Five Eyes” security alliance — the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand — and ban Huawei Technologies from Canada’s 5G wireless networks.
And we should boycott China as much as we can, which right now is fairly minimal. Supply chain, as we now say. It’s our ditch and we’ll have to live in it for awhile. We allowed the Chinese government and its minion corporations to buy their way into Canada. It must end.
I am thinking of the terror that many Hong Kong Chinese people feel at this moment as Xi closes in. With every year that passes, more people are terrorized by Beijing. I would like Canada to cut as many ties as it rationally can and ensure that anger at China doesn’t spill into inchoate racism against Canadians of Chinese origin here.
“Canada will never forget this experience and this lesson,” said Foreign Affairs Minister Marc Garneau. I greatly admire the Canadian diplomats who displayed patience and courtesy so that we don’t have to.
It’s inconvenient and expensive not to buy Chinese goods. But it’s still worth doing because each refusal accretes. Check labels and buy locally whenever you can.
Make every day Buy Nothing from China Day. Money talks. It’s the only language Xi — and Huawei — will understand.