We Don't Have to Trade With China

Can we stop trading with it now?:

MPs and advocates are calling on the federal government to resettle in Canada 10,000 Uyghurs and other Turkic Muslims who have fled China.

But experts warn that could create diplomatic challenges for Canada, as Beijing puts political and economic pressure on Chinese investment in the countries where Uyghurs have been forced to flee.

 

Don't put Justin in the unfortunate position of defying his Chinese bosses.

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If Meng rolled on her communist bosses, would she still be wearing Manolo Blahniks?:

A pair of prison vans approached the terminal at Tianjin Binhai International Airport carrying two Canadians, blindfolded and disoriented from 1,019 days in captivity.

On the moonlit tarmac, an unmarked U.S. Gulfstream jet waited to take them home. Nearby, the Canadian ambassador paced the carpeted lounge.

Fifteen time zones away, an Air China Boeing 777 stood ready at Vancouver International Airport. Armed officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police kept watch in the terminal. A Chinese executive in Manolo Blahnik heels strode past them, carrying a bag with a Carolina Herrera dress shaded the same vibrant red as China’s flag and trailed by an entourage of lawyers, aides and diplomats who called her Madam Meng. She, too, was headed home.

One of the most significant prisoner swaps in recent diplomatic history was under way, after a top-secret negotiation that was three years in the making.

At the Tianjin airport, a Chinese official was on the phone to confirm the woman’s passage through the Vancouver terminal. He then cleared the Canadian prisoners. The Canadian ambassador fumbled for their passports in a yellow envelope and ushered the men to an immigration checkpoint.

A Chinese guard stamped the passports and directed them to the runway.

When Meng Wanzhou was arrested in Canada in 2018, she was chief financial officer of China’s Huawei Technologies Co., a telecommunications giant founded by her father that was poised to win the race to build 5G networks in most of the world’s largest economies. Canadian authorities took Ms. Meng into custody in Vancouver, British Columbia, on behalf of the U.S., which had filed bank-fraud charges against her.

The detention of the 50-year-old celebrity businesswoman, and U.S. efforts to extradite her for trial in New York, transformed her into a national martyr in China and a symbol of America’s growing hostility to its nearest rival.

Days later, the two Canadians were seized in retaliation for Ms. Meng’s arrest. Michael Kovrig, 50, was on leave from Canada’s Foreign Ministry to work for the International Crisis Group in Hong Kong. Michael Spavor, 46, ran a business that helped students, athletes and academics visit North Korea. During their incarceration and harsh treatment, the two men were sympathetically shorthanded in news reports and by Western leaders as “the two Michaels.” Both men denied any wrongdoing.

The arrests marked a turning point in the growing power competition between the U.S. and China, helping shift it from mutual wariness to full-blown animosity. Unlike last century’s Cold War between the U.S. and Soviet Union, the prisoner skirmish reflected a U.S.-China battle for control of the international flow of data and, ultimately, primacy in global commerce.

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The Roman Catholic Church, as the preeminent ecclesiastical organization in the world, with over a billion practising members (including this writer), is naturally the principal protagonist defending freedom of religion. There is a precedent in Europe for the Roman Catholic Church to accept, as it has in China, a secular role in the selection of bishops, which is the chief operating criterion for the independence of an episcopal church. Similar concessions were made to King Louis XIV of France and his immediate successors, but the kings of France were militant Catholics. More instructive was Pope Paul VI’s acceptance of a veto by the communist satellite governments in Hungary and Czechoslovakia over the nomination of bishops, in part to liberate Cardinal József Mindszenty from his confinement to the U.S. Embassy in Budapest after 15 years, in 1971.

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Whatever anybody thinks of religion or Catholicism, a permanent majority dissents from the ultimate secular view that there’s a finite amount of knowledge in the world and each day we are proceeding towards a plenitude of knowledge, and that man is capable of self-perfection. And there is an almost universal revulsion to the attempt by any state, even one directed by such a genius as Napoleon (with whom China’s Xi Jinping can scarcely be compared), to stamp out or usurp the entire spiritual and intuitive function of the human mind. The issue in the renewal of the Vatican’s understanding with the People’s Republic of China is whether, as Pope Francis suggests, this agreement facilitates the expansion of religious freedom and practice in China. The opposite view, eloquently advocated by the 90-year-old cardinal of Hong Kong, Joseph Zen, who has been spuriously charged for administering a fund for assisting conscientious objectors. Cardinal Zen believes that Pope Francis has been duped by the Chinese. It is not for me to judge, though I am skeptical of any appeasement of Communists, and there is something majestic about an organization that in 2022 still regards the regime in Taipei as the government of China.

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You're finished, Vietnam:

Chinese President Xi Jinping told the visiting leader of Vietnam's ruling Communist Party on Monday that both countries and parties should "never let anyone interfere" with their progress, state broadcaster CCTV reported.

The bullish message against outside interference came at a time of strained relations between China and the West, especially with the United States over Taiwan, the Ukraine conflict, trade and other issues.

Xi and Nguyen Phu Trong, both unmasked, shook hands and embraced before taking part in a televised welcome ceremony in Beijing's Great Hall of the People - an unusual display of close contact between Xi and another leader, as China persists with strict COVID lockdowns.