ChinaComs Want Your Stuff
“The servility of Canada’s political leaders (municipal, provincial and federal) to the obvious manipulations of Chinese strategists who flaunt world trade and financial market principles and jail democracy-promoting authors for 10-year terms is a national disgrace.Canada is not a parking lot for Chinese (or American) resources and our complicity with what Glavin rightly describes as “a rigged game” orchestrated by this “increasingly vile regime” in Beijing needs to end…”
China is not the most savory country in the world, but as a BC resident, I am of two minds. China is paying for these resources, keeping people employed. The US has just postponed the Keystone pipeline again. Why not sell to China? Again, I see trade not theft. Yes we are hewers of wood etc. here in BC, but that is nothing new.
All part of the chess game.
Though I wonder how stable China will be in the long-term with the ascendance of India, their own environmental problems, and the fact that most of their population still lives in poverty. It will be interesting to see China's pretensions of being a global superpower and what the reality will truly be.
Very true, China is very likely a Paper Tiger, internal unrest is a fact of life and not a rare or sometimes occurrence.
My view of China, from here in China is rather different (I live in Hong Kong now, have lived in Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shanghai since 1976).
I see China as being "on our side" -- that is, part of the world that is "Constructive" (the West and much of Asia, very much including China) as opposed to the other part of the world which is "Destructive" (no prizes for guessing which the latter is...).China is broadly interested in the same things we are: in growing the economy, in trade, in bettering its people. It's not interested in pushing an ideology on the rest of the world and blowing them up if they don't bow down to it. The arguments we have with China are the sorts of normal every day squabbles you have with people with whom you do business. They're not about existential issues such as which God-Allah should be revered, or how women should dress and if gays should be thrown from high buildings, or if we should adopt their Sharia law.Sure the Chinese leadership has its nasty side, and sadly it seems to be getting worse. But the very fact of "internal unrest" is a reaction to the repression and ought be welcomed. It's not a sign of weakness; it's rather a sign that "the people" are having their say.Since I first went to China in '76, China has brought 500 million people out of poverty. That's a major -- nay, huuuge -- achievement. And I've seen with my own eyes how China has changed from being a truly horrid communist dictatorship to one much more open and flexible (and that's even given its jailing of artists, dissidents and other "trouble makers")More people now live in cities than in the country. When I went to China in '76, 85% were in the country. It's in cities that people have the chance to grow wealth, and that's what they're doing: just take a look at Shanghai, or any of the myriad other major cities. It's quite simply extraordinary and unprecedented in world history.As for spying: well, in the early 80s I was an Intelligence Analyst for Australia, and the best Intel we had -- from *our* spies, and that of our allies, esp the US --was about commercial stuff and we spied on friends as well as foes. Mr Binks: We ALL spy; it's the world's second-oldest profession! If you're worried the Chinese are doing it better in Canada the I'd say: Spy Harder! As for investment, what is this Binks guy saying? That it's ok for the US to invest in Canada, but not the Chinese? Excuse me, but that's just a touch, dare I say it? "racist. If you're worried about the deals the Chinese cut, then I'd say: Negotiate Harder!In all, I find the Binks piece a farrago of nonsense: paranoid, nasty, ignorant, winging, whining, ignorant and racist.Let's keep our attention on where it should be: on the world's worst ideology, one that begins with "I" and ends in "SLAM"!
[BTW: the phrase "paper tiger" was invented by Mao. He used it about the US. He was wrong about that...]
Thanks Peter you afford us insight we here are simply unable to have gathered. I'll pass your comment on to Binks.
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