What is happening in Hong Kong is appalling. Martin Regg Cohn writes:
This week, under cover of COVID-19, Beijing crossed a line it had long promised to respect. Exploiting the worst pandemic in 100 years, mainland authorities are now doing what they vowed never to do for 50 years after the handover from British rule in 1997 — right up until 2047:
Beijing will now legislate from afar what cannot be stage-managed locally. Hong Kong will henceforth be a vassal city-state.
In defiance of the Basic Law — the miniconstitution conferred upon the former colony in 1997 — the People’s Republic of China has now declared it will overrule the self-rule that is the legal right of the 7 million people living in the so-called Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region. Special status recognized Hong Kong’s special history, codified its unique rule of law, solidified its separate trading relationships with the world.
Hence the promise to preserve (and profit from) the rubric of “One country, two systems” — Chinese sovereignty amid autonomy — without hegemony. That historic vow is yet another casualty of the present pandemic.
Yet Canadians are hamstrung -- caught between two lawless strong men:
Just as Hong Kongers are being held hostage, so too Canadians are being ransomed — not just Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor (the two citizens unlawfully confined in China as bargaining chips over the Huawei affair), but also farmers whose crops and livestock are spuriously barred entry to the mainland. The suggestion that Canada unilaterally cut off Hong Kong from its special trading relationship, or snub China in other ways, is divorced from the brutal realpolitik of international relations.
The response has to be an alliance -- but it's hard for Canada to lead that alliance:
Canada can and should stitch together a broad coalition of Western countries with clout that can call China to account, if such an alliance can ever find the courage to speak up. But Canada cannot command others to follow, and is all too easily ignored if it gets out in front of the fledgling international parade.
Canadians know better than to demand that Justin Trudeau publicly lecture U.S. President Donald Trump for a transgression. Why then ask our prime minister to pointlessly hector Chinese President Xi Jinping for his aggression?
It's a difficult situation. But it can't be swept under the rug.
Image: CNN.com
10 comments:
The US seems intent on self harm, economically, politically, culturally and demographically. Included in that harm is a desire to end trade with anyone else.
No society has ever prospered without trade and chances are this will remain true . Outsourcing has hurt but is not necessary to trade.
Canada may have a difficult time trading with the US in the future; something our economy is not prepared for. China may become Canada's economic saviour .
Is it remarkable or to have been expected that Canada's elder Sinophiles in business and political circles remain so silent on this question while they're still struggling to come up with a few whimpers on Chinese handling of the pandemic? I don't expect Trudeau to be able to clean up the mess that they were so instrumental in creating.
14 May 2020
"Canada’s man in Beijing, Ambassador Dominic Barton, … told a video talk arranged last week by the Canadian International Council that he 'probably drank the Kool-Aid there for too long' when he ran the McKinsey consultancy’s China operations."
Yuk - yuk - yuk.
As long as Donald Trump is around, Canada's relationship with the United States will be problematic, rumley. The same applies to China. But we cannot shut the door to either country.
We must be clear-eyed about China, John. It has become very powerful -- and influential. But that does not mean that it has become a model of international behaviour.
Neoliberalism can blind us to the threat the world faces in China. We tolerate too much fearing a disruption of trade would be too high a price to pay. When China whipsaws our agricultural producers for political purposes we look the other way and focus on smoothing the waters. We know that China is holding two of our citizens hostage and yet do next to nothing about it, figuring that once the extradition hearings are over China will set them free.
What message is the West conveying to China except "you've got us over the barrel now"? China is a hegemon and whereas that once was framed in the context of the Third World and developing nations, China also is targeting Western nations.
We've given China a voice on the Arctic Council even though it's a thousand miles distant from the Arctic. China calls itself a "near-Arctic nation" to establish its rights to establish a commercial (seabed mining) and a permanent military presence in the polar region. There's no subterfuge in this. They've openly proclaimed that the Law of the Sea doesn't apply to the Arctic Ocean and that they're entitled to establish a permanent and powerful military presence in that region. They're accomplished island builders in the South China sea. How hard would it be for them to build man-made island/bases in the Arctic?
The conventional answer would be containment but globalism works at cross-purposes to that sort of thing. Let me know when you find a leader willing to come to grips with that thorny problem.
The problem with other countries calling China to account is who is supposed to do it?
Canada? Even if we wouldn't be ignored, our own unilateral repudiation of our treaties with the First Nations disqualifies us.
The USA? It sickens me how even after turning the Middle East into a charnel house, people still imagine that those evil maniacs have any moral standing?
All down the line. The UK? Europe? Brazil? Israel?
The "rule of law" went out the window a long time ago. We need to get our own houses in order before engaging in hypocritical condemnation of China.
The 20th century should have taught us that global alliances foster containment. History should have taught us that when we establish global "free trade," narrow national self-interest ends in war.
Oh, how easily we forget, Mound.
Point well taken, thwap. For decades we have supported the powerful and abandoned the weak. That record does not bolster our credibility.
I can't abide either China or the US. Although i chuckled at China's response to Kenney's blah blah blah on Covid-19 when the only investors who haven't pulled out of his precious tarsands are Chinese, both state and private. Er, um, er.
And I'm not that crazy about Russia, although I feel for them to some extent, their borders ringed by US nuclear missiles, and the reflexive numb nuts treatment we hand out to Putin over Trump on some useless made-up pretext never proven even by that living skeleton, whatisname who ran an 18 month enquiry. Trump threatens Germany for having the unmitigated gall to want to buy Russian natural gas through the new Baltic Sea pipeline. The threat is only realistic because of the way the US can control sanctions through its ownership of the international payments system right down to the company level. They swashbuckled over Mercedes and Peugeot in Iran. The fact that China is developing an alternative payment system to get around US hegemony in this regard is what annoys the US intensely. They pick up satellite countries who the US is used to bullying by being less overtly abusive and not sending in the planes and troops. The rest of the "nonsense" the US goes on about China is flimflam to make it look as though something else actually matters beyond control of money movements.
And sorry, I haven't read anyone on Progressive Bloggers who has any clue on foreign affairs beyond Canadian Dimension. I could read the same insipid stuff in our main stream media, as we closely hew to the US line. An American columnist recently said our foreign policy is run out of a basement office in the Pentagon. Sounds about right to me. It might actually be from the Dunkin Donuts across the street from the US State Dept at Foggy Bottom - both show how we are nobodies and that low level junior US bureaucrats are regarded as good enough to tell us how to operate.
We still have Trudeau wandering around looking for support for a UN Security Council seat, after having lied though his teeth over Venezuela and Bolivia, the latter now run by right wing anti-indigenous racists. The rest of the world's non-aligned countries take note of our lapdog tightness with the US and our actual actions rather than Trudeau's soaring rhetoric, and since they get to vote for who gets that Security Council seat, against Norway we don't have a chance. Rightly so.
I mean look how we've kept that Huawei exec cooling her heels in Vancouver for 18 months of our literally farting around. What rule of law? An extradition for a Texas killer apprehended here in NS took 6 months, long enough even for lawyers to write up this and that report and have a few two martini lunches. So we've politicized the Huawei thing, and then squawk when Big Boy China grabs two questionable citizens of ours, hardly model Canadians. What did we expect? We're nobodies, and we have to resort to nattering about rule of law and pretending fake independence rather than admit we're a US puppet.
On the other hand, let China go hang on the food front - if they don't want our food, well my response is to cross them off the list for ever. They can find someone else to supply their pigs and rapeseed - they won't even allow us to press it into Canola oil for them. Canada, ever the hewers of wood and drawers of water. And guess who stepped up without a trace of shame on supplying pigs, the US. We're nobodies. who can and are bossed around by almost anybody. Wait till Boris the Bozo finds out that England faces the same fate - that of a complete nonentity.
BM
When it came to foreign affairs, we used to punch above our weight, BM. But that was in the days of Lester Pearson. We have not produced another like him.
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