For all of the confusion about where the Ottawa-Washington meltdown will lead, one thing seems certain. The big winners of this diplomatic collapse will be China and other repressive dictatorships eager to become our new “strategic” partners and further undermine the world’s stabilizing democracy bloc.
Opinion piece by Charles Burton, former diplomat at Canada’s embassy in Beijing, senior fellow at Sinopsis.cz, a China-focused think tank based in Prague, Czech Republic. He is and author of ‘The Beaver and the Dragon: How China Out-Manoeuvred Canada’s Diplomacy, Security and Sovereignty’.
…
Beijing in particular wants to inherit Canada’s economic dependence. Establishing such a broader North American beachhead will only further President Xi Jinping’s resolute goal of displacing the U.S. as a global hegemon, and cementing a China-dominated world order whose very foundation is the rejection of democratic freedoms and human rights.
…
If Canada ever reaches a point where attacks on our economy put families’ livelihoods at stake, then standing firm on our moral principles will give way to tolerating – or at least ignoring – human rights abuses in exchange for restoring Canadian prosperity through trade and investment with the likes of Qatar, Saudi Arabia and China. As someone who has been sanctioned by both Beijing and Moscow for standing up for Canadian democratic and civil values in global affairs, this prospect is deeply troubling.
…
When Mr. Xi makes a landmark trip to North America next month, it is expected he will add a Canadian stop, the first time in 16 years a Chinese head of state has visited this country. And this at a time when there have been calls for Ottawa to scrap restrictions on importing Chinese-made EVs, to locate Chinese auto factories here, and to even encourage Canadians to buy “Great Wall wine” instead of Californian.
In contrast to the belligerent threats that Canadians have been conditioned to expect from Washington, the Chinese President will project dignity and a tone of respect and goodwill toward Prime Minister Mark Carney and his Canadian business associates, who will be offering a warm welcome to the Chinese delegation.
But like Howitt’s “Spider and the Fly,” in which a cunning spider uses seduction and manipulation to lure a fly into its web, Canada should be wary of those who wield flattery and charm to disguise other intentions. Rushing to embrace China’s expansionist and calculating totalitarian regime will never work out well for Canada’s overall interest.
In the current hostile landscape, Canada could find itself deeply regretting coming out of an American frying pan into a Chinese fire.
…
China is better than America because they’re way less likely to interfere outside its own borders (yet still do it, hence all the shit in the South China Sea, plus lets not forget Taiwan) and when they do their impact on the rest of the World is much smaller.
That is however, for now.
If things carry on in the direction they seem to be going and China replaces the US as the World’s foremost imperial power (the kind of things History shows us invariably happens and is even roughly on schedule), given enough time they’ll be as bad as America is now.
As somebody else mentioned when quoting (I believe) a Canadian politician, middle powers should stick together. If you look at the EU, that’s basically one of its purposes, which is probably why American Administrations of either color dislike it - it use to be much easier for America to push around European nations, even the mid-sized ones.
China pushes everyone in their region around massively, actually. The US has been a lot easier to live next to until now.
Even if we pretend China’s as big of a threat, though, that just means we should play them off each other.
I guess the Canadian PM is, technically, a Canadian politician 😂
Dude China is so much worse. They are just really good at staying under the radar. Everything they do is with the underlying motivation to subvert the west.
It’s really the CCP that’s the villain. The Chinese people in and of themselves can be very decent. The CCP is like a wild animal really attempting to exert its dominance. Ruthless, unfeeling, and indifferent to suffering.
There are those among us that are pieces of shit sometimes too, but we are far better than the CCP. A world under CCP rule would be really and truly be like 1984. South Korea - North Korea, West Germany - East Germany, Warsaw pact Poland - Democratic Poland. The juxtaposition is very telling.
We have to find a way to get along. The Canadians need to accept they are dealing with Trump. I’m sorry, but that’s the dude for two more years. Just placate him and find a way to kick the can down the road that postpones when any additional tariff or trade barrier would come into effect. It will provide time for the courts to have a shot at blocking them. Just keep playing games with him by delaying them, and try to wait him out. Keep in mind most of us don’t like the tariffs either.
Providing abundance is humanism. It will always beat an oligarchy enforcing scarcity, economically. The dementia that abundance for their people and world, and profits that come from helping world is “to subvert the west” is pure oligarchist BS lies meant for dumb people to hope their patriotic oligarchists love them as much as the ads and politicians claim they love them.
I mean, the CCP is itself not a monolith. It’s an institution, that shifts and evolves like institutions tend to.
Totalitarianism can happen, and they’re way closer to it than we are, but, I dunno, evil is banal. Going that far into the villain narrative just helps obscure the real situation.
Mate, all dictatorships are shit.
No need for Red Scare bollocks - just look at Pinochet in Chile or Putin in Russia which are at the opposite end of the Left-Right political spectrum and you’ll see similar shit as the CCP. Hell, just look at what’s increasingly happening in America and you see them pretty much moving at speed towards that kind of shit.
That however has no relevance on my point that America is nastier for people outside of America in general than China is, if only because America has invaded way more countries and killed way more people than China has and the repercussions of America’s action’s abroad for rest of the World tend to be larger (just look at the current gas prices at the pump if you have any doubts of that, or go read the History of how ISIS was born in American prisons in Iraq).
It just so happened that through most of that time Canada wasn’t a target of American nastiness so it didn’t look like that to Canadians who didn’t give a shit about the rest of the World, but rather it was mainly directed against South American and Middle Eastern nations.
Oh, we’re definitely waiting him out. There’s no reason to play along with him while we do that, though. We’ll just hold our breath until the stink clears.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_and_Michael_Kovrig is a glaring counter example showing they don’t have any particular issue with acting outside their own borders.
https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlmntry-bndrs/20240719/43-en.aspx is another alarming example of China intentionally undermining Canadian sovereignty.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_government_interference_in_Canada demonstrates that there is no democratic institution in Canada that China is not willing to attack. These are not allies. They are only talking to us because they know its a path to placing us in a more vulnerable position.
Next to just what’s happening to Oil prices worldwide due to America’s and Israel’s attack on Iran, your single example of China’s interference abroad (the second one, as your first example is not even that since it happened in China) are pretty much zero impact actions.
Even in a 100% Canada-centric perspective, just Trump’s tariffs cause way, WAY, WAY more pain to Canadians in aggregate than two Canadians being unfairly arrested for almost 3 years in China, and China running “Foreign Police Stations” in Canada targeting Chinese Nationals living in Canada.
My point stands that “China is better than America”, not because China is good but because America is horrible. Further, even whilst (until recently) America was treating Canada reasonably well, that doesn’t mean they America wasn’t a horrible nasty nation - they were just did inflicted the suffering on people in various countries amongst which was not Canada - just ask most people living in Latin American or the Middle East how nice America is.
My point also stands that when China does interfere abroad “their impact on the rest of the World is much smaller” than America’s. I mean the immediate example of that is America’s attack on Iran and what’s happening to Oil prices Worldwide due to it, but well before that America was always (almost literally “always”: if I remember it correctly the US was only ever not at war for 7 years in its entire History) attacking other countries and have left enormous piles of corpses in many of them. China did do some pretty fucked up shit abroad (most notably attacking and annexing Tibet), it’s just that they haven’t done in quite a while whilst America has done some of their nastiest things in the last 2 or 3 decades and have done a lot more of that and left a lot more people dead on their trail.
And, of course, your examples of China’s abuses in Canada and against Canadians in China just reinforces my expectation that eventually China will be just as bad as America once it finds itself in a similar position.