Tippy-Toeing To Favour Beijing

"We were worked until we were nothing more than dumb animals. When the nurses grabbed my arm to vaccinate me, I thought they were poisoning me. In reality, they were sterilizing us."

"That was when I understood the method of the camps --- was not to kill us in cold blood but to make us slowly disappear."

Gulbahar Haitiwaji, Uyghur woman from Xianjiang, refugee, France

 

"There are no restrictions whatsoever on their personal freedom."

"Mass arbitrary detentions are just concoctions fanned up by some U.S. and Western institutions and personnel."

"[In China, people of all ethnic groups are imbued with a sense of happiness and security as a result of] preventive counter-terrorism and de-radicalization [measures Beijing undertakes]."

"Stop interfering in China's internal affairs ... so as not to cause further damages to China-Canada relations."

Statement, Chinese embassy in Ottawa

"The relationship between Canada and China is a very important relationship but it also has intersections with the relationship between the U.S. and China."

"So, we're going to develop in the coming weeks with the new administration our ideas about the two Michaels [Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, Canadians accused by Beijing of espionage and imprisoned incommunicado for two years] and other issues that jointly affect our countries, vis-a-vis China."

Marc Garneau, newly appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada

China's President Xi Jinping and Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau are shown at the Group of 20 summit in Osaka, Japan on June 29, 2019.  
(KAZUHIRO NOGI/AFP via Getty Images)

Mr. Garneau's predecessor, himself not very long in the job of Minister of Foreign Affairs, Francois-Philippe Champagne, set out to establish alliances with other democratic countries being bullied by a newly-overt aggressive Beijing, in an effort to push back against its hostage-diplomacy tactics and its trade-punishment tacks to keep other nations in line. Two years ago, Canada earned Beijing's wrath by acceding to a request for extradition by the United States targeting Huawei's chief financial officer, Meng Wanzhou, which resulted in the two Michaels being arrested in Beijing several days later.

 

Michael Kovrig (left) and Michael Spavor (right)

"I'll do what I think is in Canada's best interest, trust me", Mr. Champagne recently said in an interview.

"I'll take no lessons from anyone, and certainly not from China when it comes to defending and standing up for values and principles and defending Canadian interests and defending Michael Kovrig and Spavor. We will make sure not only with Canada, but with our partners and allies around the world that the world is watching. That's my message to China: that the world is watching, because in 2020 the case of Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor goes beyond the border of Canada."

 

A pro-Uighur rally. Photograph: Jérôme Favre/EPA

The-then minister criticized China in tandem with Canada's close contact with other democracies over Beijing's Hong Kong policies, and above all, over its re-education and work camps employing Chinese Uyghurs, along with its sterilization of Uyghur women. His stern admonitions to China, his efforts at rallying like democracies to the cause of urging Beijing to release the two Canadians, along with the plight of three other Canadians placed on death row in China ostensibly for trafficking drugs failed to reflect the Trudeau government's more gentle stance on all these matters. And he was summarily removed.

 

So unexpectedly in fact, that it was the incoming Minister of Foreign Affairs to whom the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa expressed their "strong dissatisfaction" with Canada's interference in China's internal affairs, calling upon him to see that Canada cancels measures announced the day before to prohibit the importation of goods "wholly or in part produced with forced labour" in Xinjiang, where a fifth of the global cotton production comes from, the labour for which is forced upon the area's Uyghur population.

 

A Uyghur woman, Gulbahar Haitiwaji, originally from Xianjiang, living with her family in France since 2006 returned to her Xianjiang home briefly to enable her to sign paperwork. While there she came under arrest and was detained for two years in a re-education camp. She wrote an account of her "waking nightmare" when she was released and returned to France. Writing of being subjected to Communist Party propaganda all her waking hours while housed in a windowless building without privacy where surveillance cameras were everywhere.

 

Silence was enforced. She wrote that her ability to think, to perceive, to act, became degraded through long sessions of mind control, all of which concluded with the mantra: "Long live President Xi Jinping". Her account of this loss of two years of her life was published just this week by The Guardian. Canada's relations with China have reached such a low ebb that it seems nothing could close that gap. All the while the current Liberal government of Justin Trudeau is loathe to surrender its aspirational relations with Beijing as a source of trade and investment.

Members of the Uighur community and supporters demonstrate near the Eiffel Tower in Paris in 2020. Photograph: Mohammed Badra/EPA