Trade Options

Ever since Tiannamen Square, the world has had its conscience awakened. Of course prior to that we had knowledge of Communist China's revolution that resulted in the deaths of millions of Chinese during the convulsive period of Chairman Mao Tsetung, where people were considered expendable to the ideals of the greater cause of communism; the intellectuals, the professionals in the population were sacrificed to the greater good of the great ideology.

Anyone who questioned the authority and the direction of the giant country under its repressive communist regime was denounced and life was forfeit. Children were indoctrinated into the close-minded ideology of the regime and then tasked with specific instructions to report abuses within society where people might complain, criticize or express disdain of the system. Parents, siblings, teachers and friends were identified as enemies of the state, and imprisoned, tortured and murdered.

There are still ongoing issues of human rights abuses within that giant country of 1.2 billion people. China has produced a turn-about in its progress toward becoming an economically-viable 21st century country, embracing its version of capitalism, and has produced excellent social programmes to benefit its people, but it still has a brutal mindset which it trots out from time to time, just to let everyone know who controls things there.

From its aggressively-hegemonic relations with Taiwan to its determined hold on Tibet its agenda remains fiercely locked in imperialism. Its hounding of minority groups that it feels threatens its security through the gradual undermining of its secular authority is legendary and only now improving somewhat with its legitimization of a Christian minority presence. But its persecution of the Falon Gong, its imprisonment of practitioners, and its suspect harvesting of human body parts presents a horror story of human rights abuses.

And while we admire China for its past culture, traditions and achievements, along with the intellectual advances in science and medicine and the arts and humanities of the past, we have our doubts about the present. China's vast population display on average a truly superior intelligence and creative abilities; our admiration has been well earned. But it is the current governing group's recalcitrance to observe moral and ethical boundaries that remain troublesome.

Right now, China is Canada's second largest trading partner, behind the United States. It's mostly a one-way trade though, since a relatively paltry $7.66 billion worth of goods were exported, while $34.47 billion were imported into Canada last year. China gets our raw materials; we receive China's finished goods. In the last few decades when Canada's former governments were pressed on the issue of doing business with a repressive regime, they always hemmed and hawed about how much better it was to maintain trade contact for the eventuality of opening the potential for human-rights dialogue.

Now the Government of Canada is taking a new tack, a more responsible one. China now operates on the thesis put forward by Canada's previous governments, doing business with a murderous regime like that of Khartoum, buying their energy resources, investing in the country's infrastructure, while demurring when it is urged to use its good auspices to decry Sudan's genocidal war against its black population. But the question of human rights is writ larger for Canadians doing business in China now; our government has placed the issue upfront.

Canada's trade relations with China have become strained most notably with several incidents which China felt unhappy about as Canadian initiatives. That of conferring honourary Canadian citizenship by Canada on Tibet's exiled Dalai Lama. And Canada's public utterances through its prime minister relating to China's ventures in industrial espionage. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has proclaimed loud and clear that this country has no intention of selling out "important Canadian values" in the interests of sustaining trade.

Observers have realized a clear shift in Canada's foreign policy toward China from the unfortunately supine and self-interested stance of former governments to the current issue of Canada's democracy-and-human-rights determinations.
Well, good on us.