Edwards: PM's Beijing trip — more hype than hope

Edwards: PM's Beijing trip — more hype than hope

Fred Edwards


Prime Minister Stephen Harper and China's President Hu Jintao chat at the APEC leaders summit in Singapore Nov. 15, 2009.
ADRIAN WYLD/THE CANADIAN PRESS FILE PHOTO
Now that Stephen Harper is China bound, it is tempting to believe that this country's recently troubled relationship with the Middle Kingdom will revert to the coziness of the past.

That prospect may well be mistaken, and perhaps even undesirable.

First of all, is Canada well equipped to take advantage of warmer relations with China? A report earlier this year by professor Charles Burton of Brock University, who has twice served as a councillor at the Canadian embassy in Beijing, suggests it is not.

Burton's report, A Reassessment of Canada's Interests in China and Options for Renewal of Canada's China Policy, was sharply critical of the competence of Canadian diplomatic personnel: "Our diplomats typically lack fluency in Chinese, and therefore lack the capacity to establish informal contacts with influential policy-makers in the Chinese system."

Instead, they engage China primarily through the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the "international offices" of other ministries. But these tend to be weak players in the Chinese power structure – senior Chinese Communists have been known to dismiss foreign affairs officials as mere "interpreters."

Burton's report called for wider engagement with influential Chinese decision-makers in the state council (cabinet), Communist party, and provincial and local governments. That's good advice, but following it will be difficult given Canada's relatively shallow talent pool of China experts.

Our government's failings have been mirrored in the business community. Canadian business leaders – Jim Balsillie of RIM is an example – have been critical of the Harper government's coolness toward China, but Canadian companies have not been particularly aggressive in the Chinese market. China accounts for only 6 per cent of Canada's merchandise trade and only 2 per cent of Canadian exports – almost 80 per cent of our exports go to the United States. The story is the same for investment: almost 44 per cent of Canada's international investments in 2007 were made in the United States and only 0.3 per cent in China.

Sarah Kutulakos, executive director of the Canada China Business Council, put her finger on the problem: "It's so easy to come back and export to the U.S," she said last month at a Fraser Institute function. "We really need to convince more Canadian firms to include China in their strategies while welcoming more Chinese investment to Canada."

Yet is that a realistic prospect given the continental integration of the North American economy? Can the Canadian business class, so accustomed to operating in a familiar milieu as low-dollar exporters, display the creativity and flexibility required to break into the highly competitive Chinese market?

Canada's economic orientation toward the United States raises another question, and that is whether Harper's government has the skill or even the desire to find manoeuvring room between Washington and Beijing. Liberal leaders Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin all sought to expand the focus of Canadian foreign policy beyond its traditional North Atlantic orientation. Chrétien, in particular, aggressively promoted Sino-Canadian trade and was bold enough to criticize America's "cowboy-style attitude" during the 2001 Hainan Island incident, when a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese jet fighter collided off the coast of China.

After coming to power in 2006, Harper pointedly rejected the Liberals' emphasis on multilateralism and reinforced the Washington link by following the U.S. lead across a wide policy front.

From economic stimulus and the bailout of the North American auto industry to a future continental cap-and-carbon trading system and perhaps a continental approach to border security, Canada has looked to Washington for leadership. At the same time, some prominent Canadians are promoting a new bilateral trade deal with the United States that would exclude Mexico and bind the American and Canadian economies even closer together. The subject of currency union has been raised, as well as a common Canada-U.S. policy on Arctic territorial waters. The end result could well be that future Canadian prime ministers will find it much more difficult to balance Washington and Beijing the way Chrétien did.

And how can China be expected to view the Canadian-U.S. relationship? Canada's resource-based economy would seem a natural fit for China's burgeoning manufacturing sector but will Beijing be comfortable relying on a strong U.S. ally for strategic minerals or energy? Better to deal with outcasts like Sudan or Venezuela, or non-aligned states in Africa.

Finally, there is the troublesome issue of human rights. The onset of the Sino-Canadian chill can be dated to Ottawa's criticism of China's jailing of Huseyin Celil, a Canadian citizen who belongs to China's Uighur Muslim minority, in the summer of 2006. Later that year, and referring explicitly to the Sino-Canadian relationship, Harper famously said: "I think Canadians want us to promote our trade relations worldwide, and we do that. But I don't think Canadians want us to sell out important Canadian values. They don't want us to sell that out to the almighty dollar."

This was a refreshing change from the days when Chrétien had clowned around with Li Peng, one of the architects of the Tiananmen massacre. Now, however, Harper appears to have come around to the view that the dollar is almighty after all. Is this progress?

Perhaps the Prime Minister will surprise us in Beijing and articulate a balanced, constructive policy that offers realistic economic goals without losing sight of democratic values. More likely, though, we will have a photo-op that allows Harper to close the politically troublesome China file while leaving Canada both uncompetitive in the Chinese market and ever more silent on human rights and democracy.


Fred Edwards is a member of the Star's editorial board and a former editor at Beijing Review, a news magazine published by the Chinese government.