In Print

No more Mr. Nice Guy

By Kevin Steel ⋅ December 18, 2006 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

The federal government’s hard line on human rights in China incites pro-democracy friends and business foes

Call it Ottawa’s unofficial China Day. On Nov. 21, Beijing’s envoy, Lu Shumin, spoke before a group of 500 business leaders at the Canadian Club, asking Canada to show respect and not “point fingers” at the state of human rights in his country. At the same time, a half a kilometre away, a Commons subcommittee was hearing testimony on ending our government-to-government human rights dialogue with China–talks ongoing since 1997. And outside, on the Parliament grounds, a coalition of 13 groups, from democracy advocates to Falun Gong, demonstrated in support of the Conservative government’s hard line on Chinese Communist human rights violations.

The Chinese envoy was given a sympathetic hearing in the Canadian media, his words about China’s commitment to human rights being reprinted nationwide with few dissenting voices. And business leaders like the Canadian Council of Chief Executives’ president Thomas d’Aquino stepped up to criticize the Conservatives’ stance on China–a stance summed up by Harper on his way to the APEC summit in Hanoi, saying “[Canadians] don’t want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar.” D’Aquino and others believe words like these are wrong-headed and harmful to trade with booming China.

The Parliament Hill demonstrators, however, loved what Harper said. The 200 participants included representatives from the Falun Gong, Tibetans, Vietnamese and Chinese democracy activists. They were overjoyed to see a western leader finally standing up to Beijing–and stunned by the Canadian media and business community swallowing the Beijing line. “I can’t believe they are saying these things, like they believe them,” Falun Gong representative Lucy Zhou said of some of Canada’s business leaders. “It’s a totalitarian regime, a Communist evil, and they don’t behave like a normal country.”

China’s record on human rights is by most accounts abysmal. For years, the slow genocide of the Tibetan people by Chinese incursion has been a major source of international concern. On Sept. 30, an international mountain-climbing expedition witnessed Chinese border guards casually open fire on a group of Tibetans crossing the Himalayas on a pilgrimage to the Dalai Lama in India.

Less well known than the Tibetans plight is the repression of the Uyghur Muslims in eastern Xinjiang province, where for years the Communists conducted above-ground nuclear tests with little regard for the population. Harper’s snubbing by Chinese President Hu Jintao at APEC in mid-November was apparently in retaliation for the prime minister’s stated intention to question China’s detention of Uyghur-Canadian activist Huseyin Celil of Burlington, seized on a trip to Uzbekistan and then extradited to a Chinese prison.

Human rights organizations complain continually about Beijing’s jailing of outspoken journalists and lawyers.

The detentions of lawyer Gao Zhisheng and artist Yan Zhengxue, both held incommunicado, are some recent examples. In the larger picture, China has the highest number of executions in the world–not surprising in a country where 68 separate offences warrant the death penalty. The population is constantly monitored on the Internet, aided by western high-tech giants like Google, and the crackdowns on popular protests, whether for the return of seized land or simply religious freedom, can be brutal.

The most egregious charges against Beijing concern the persecution of the Falun Gong. Members claim the regime supplies a stream of Falun Gong prisoners to designated Chinese hospitals, where their organs are removed and sold to wealthy foreigners. These gruesome charges have been supported by credible testimony and evidence, and former MP David Kilgour and lawyer David Matas have drafted a report on the situation.

Though envoy Shumin’s speech and the demonstration garnered most of the headlines, the Commons subcommittee did some serious work. Canada’s approach to China is under review, including the $50 million in foreign aid sent there yearly–much of it for “good governance education.” However, the subcommittee’s primary focus is on the Canada-China Joint Committee on Human Rights (CCJCHR). In the mid-nineties, the Communists were concerned that the United Nations would vote to sanction them for their human rights record. So Beijing devised a divide-and-conquer strategy. China proposed to establish a government-to-government human rights dialogue in each western nation, in exchange for their abstaining at the UN. Canada, among others, bit on the idea and set up the CCJCHR in 1997; it has met every year since.

Brock University political science professor Charles Burton, a former Canadian diplomat in China, was involved in the early implementation of the CCJCHR dialogues. He has authored an assessment of the program for the Department of Foreign Affairs, now under review by the subcommittee. Burton discovered a fundamental disjunction between how Canada and China viewed the dialogue. “The report clearly indicates that the Chinese government does not see the human rights dialogue process as being something that will impact on any changes domestically in China. But they see it more as responding to western government needs to demonstrate to their citizens and NGOs that they are doing something to stand on the side of social justice in China,” Burton says. In other words, though the dialogues were established as a favour to China–to avoid a vote against them at the UN–the Chinese foreign ministry now sees them as essentially a favour for publicity-conscious western governments.

Ironically for Canada, this era of quiet diplomacy has had little impact on trade. A few companies may have benefited, but the overall results have been negligible from a growth perspective. Relative to other countries, Canada’s market share of China trade declined during this quiet diplomacy, asserts Burton. He points out further that Denmark didn’t go along to get along, and kept up a hard line on human rights in China. For years Beijing threatened trade reprisals, but none materialized. So the trade argument against Harper’s harder line doesn’t hold, and the change might improve things. “I think that if we speak frankly and openly with China about our concerns it engenders more respect and should lead to better relations–that would include improved economic and political relations,” Burton says.

China has shown little respect for Canada, pirating its technology for years–so grossly evident in their BlackBerry ripoff, renamed the RedBerry–and is alleged to have a network of more than 1,000 spies working here. Through its envoy, Beijing has called for Canada to show respect. Perhaps by nailing them on their human rights abuses, Beijing can be taught to respect Canada.

[This article appeared in the December 18, 2006 issue of the Western Standard.]