It’s a circle that can’t be easily squared.
On the one hand, there’s the spectacle of Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly happily abasing herself at the feet of Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Beijing on Friday after being summoned to China to take instruction on how Canada should behave itself as Xi Jinping persists in flouting international trade rules, accelerates his encirclement of Taiwan and pours ever greater resources into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On the other hand, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland begins consultations with business and labour groups this week to discuss how to deal with what she calls “unfair Chinese trade practices.” The measures are expected to include some degree of conformity with stiff American and imminent European tariffs on electric vehicles and other Chinese imports.
In an interview about the consultations with Bloomberg News, Freeland offered a rare and candid admission of the calamitous error the Liberals are generally disinclined to mention out loud, namely that “China’s entry to the World Trade Organization more than two decades ago,” which former prime minister and lifelong China-trade enthusiast Jean Chrétien championed, “was a mistake.”
That China’s admission to the WTO was a colossal error, a cross-partisan consensus that has emerged in recent years in the NATO capitals, has been coming to the fore quite a bit lately. “I think it’s high time for us to be clear-eyed about that,” Freeland said.
The Americans are clear-eyed about it, across the board. Earlier this year, a report released by the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai noted that rather than bringing China into the norms of the international trading system, China is using its place within the WTO to undermine the system. “It has been 22 years since China acceded to the WTO, and China still embraces a state-directed, non-market approach to the economy and trade, which runs counter to the norms and principles embodied by the WTO.”
That’s Freeland’s standpoint. But Joly is a Chrétien protegee, and her mission in Beijing is just another milestone in the Trudeau Liberals’ efforts to restore relations to the warmth and intimacy they’d been nurturing with the Chinese Communist Party leadership until public revulsion got in the way fairly decisively in December, 2018.
That’s when the Chinese Ministry of State Security abducted on-leave diplomat Michael Kovrig and entrepreneur Michael Spavor in retaliation for the detention in Vancouver of Huawei Chief Financial Officer Meng Wanzhou on a U.S. fraud and sanctions-evasion warrant.
It was only a few months after Kovrig and Spavor were released following a plea deal Meng’s lawyers concluded with the U.S. justice department that a series of leaks from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service revealed that the Trudeau government had been sitting on explosive evidence that China had been deeply involved in monkeywrenching the 2019 and 2021 federal elections to the Liberals’ advantage.
Right through these tumultuous disruptions to Canada-China relations, however, the Liberals have been intent on maintaining the advantage and status that Liberal-friendly Canadian corporations had secured in trade policy and foreign policy.
After four years of Liberal promises to bring Canada’s approach to China into the 21st century, the November, 2022 federal Indo-Pacific Strategy contained the smidgen of an acknowledgement that Chinese strongman Xi Jinping’s state-capitalist kleptocracy had caused severe structural damage to the West’s liberal rules-based global order.
But then Trudeau more or less detonated the Indo-Pacific Strategy by rising in the House of Commons last September to accuse the government of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi of being linked to the murder of a Canadian, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, at a Sikh temple in Surrey, B.C. Indo-Canadian relations went straight into the dumpster and there’s no “reset” in the works.
In Beijing on Friday, Wang Yi left little to the imagination in what China will expect of Canada in the back-to-the-future relationship Joly is hoping to restore. We should shut up about Beijing’s evisceration of Hong Kong’s democracy and its trampling of civil liberties there. We should shut up about the brutal oppression of the Muslim-minority Uyghur people of Xinjiang, and we should mind our business about Beijing’s menacing manoeuvres in the Taiwan Strait and the South China Sea.
We’re turning the clock all the way back to 2016, when Wang famously berated, badgered, insulted and lectured the reporter Amanda Connolly in a long harangue in the lobby of Global Affairs headquarters in Ottawa. At a news conference, Connolly had put a question to Stéphane Dion, Canada’s foreign affairs minister at time, about how Canada intended to press its concerns about Beijing’s judicial abductions, the violations of solemn civil rights commitments Beijing had made, and so on.
“Your question is full of prejudice against China and arrogance,” Wang blurted. “This is totally unacceptable. . . I would like to suggest to you that please don’t ask questions in such an irresponsible manner.” Dion, standing at Wang’s side, just stood there looking pathetic.
Over the weekend, Joly was positively bubbly about her reception in Beijing. There was the usual boast about Canada’s alleged defence of its democracy “and the values it has always stood for, including human rights.” But the main point of the meeting was to reaffirm a policy of “pragmatic engagement” and “the development of sound and stable bilateral relations.”
Joly’s visit came in the wake of NATO’s 32 member-state consensus statement two weeks ago, which fingered China as a “decisive enabler” of Russia’s war on Ukraine through its “no limits” partnership and its “large-scale support for Russia’s defence-industrial base,” the NATO statement declared.
“This increases the threat Russia poses to its neighbours and to Euro-Atlantic security.” Beijing should “cease all material and political support to Russia’s war effort,” including “the transfer of dual-use materials, such as weapons components, equipment and raw materials that serve as inputs for Russia’s defence sector. The PRC (People’s Republic of China) cannot enable the largest war in Europe in recent history without this negatively impacting its interests and reputation.”
Beijing “continues to pose systemic challenges to Euro-Atlantic security” by engaging in “sustained malicious cyber and hybrid activities, including disinformation,” the statement read.
It’s all well and good to engage in Joly-style “pragmatic engagement,” but NATO’s members are “boosting our shared awareness, enhancing our resilience and preparedness, and protecting against the PRC’s coercive tactics and efforts to divide the Alliance.”
Wang Yi’s invitation to Joly and her submission to his requirements for a renewed Canada-China relationship are consistent with that coercion and of a piece with Beijing’s efforts to divide NATO against itself.
It is not clear that Joly understands this, or that she even particularly cares.
National Post