Canada’s Response to a More Aggressive China? Silence

As Trump is mysteriously quiet about Russia, Trudeau is silent on China. It is very curious why the two of North America’s leaders are so silent. Is there no leader with the balls to speak about the blatantness of China? China’s increasingly aggressive behaviour includes:

• Forced technological transfer to Chinese companies, if you wish to sell product in China
• Claiming the South China Sea and all islands as Chinese, with historical reasoning.
• blatant human rights abuses against not only their own citizens, but also those of Taiwan and Hong Kong
• Tolerance of an increasingly nuclear North Korea

At least the US has representatives, though not Trump, that somewhat says censures China’s aggressive attitude to internationalization.

On Monday, in his first major public speech, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the system is broken, that the World Trade Organization can’t cope with the unprecedented bullying and conniving of an increasingly aggressive People’s Republic of China — the WTO wasn’t built for the kind of police-state threat that China poses.

“The sheer scale of their co-ordinated effort to develop their economy, to subsidize, to create national champions, to force technology transfers and to distort markets in China and throughout the world is a threat to the world trading system that is unprecedented,” Lighthizer told a Washington, D.C. symposium…

Yet when it comes to Canada, while the majority of Canadians I talk to oppose increased Chinese influence, our Prime Minister Trudeau is silent. How about taking some of your selfie energy and put some effort into leadership?

But for now, as always, on China there is silence.

“Mr. Trudeau’s silence on China’s much more aggressive assertion of its strategic interests in global affairs is disconcerting,” Brock University’s Charles Burton, one of Canada’s few genuine authorities on China, told me Tuesday night. “If Canada has a coherent policy on China’s facilitation of North Korea’s nuclear threat, or Chinese state exploitation of the world’s worst dictatorships to serve its corrupt interests, or on how to counter China’s massive violation of international law in building military bases in the South China Sea, Mr. Trudeau evidently prefers to keep it to himself.”

Will Canada stand up to so called Canadian values? Right now we are decidedly sitting down.

And now a word from Europe on China. “Promise Fatigue” is a term I have not heard before, but is fitting.

European Chamber of Commerce on mainland says its members are suffering from ‘promise fatigue’, with little done to tackle unfair trading conditions

The European Union Chamber of Commerce in China has urged Beijing to act on its promises and take concrete steps to give fair market access to foreign firms operating on the mainland.

European firms are “suffering from accumulated ‘promise fatigue’, having witnessed a litany of assurances over recent years that never quite materialised,” the report added.

Harbon at the EU chamber in China said: “The lack of reciprocity in market access is not politically sustainable. We worry that if China is not moving from words to action, this could lead to a backlash against economic globalisation.