We Don't Have to Trade With China

It's not like it's helping us:

Jimmy Lai could well have decamped to Canada as the Chinese Communist Party started strangling Hong Kong’s freedoms four years ago.

(Sidebar: this Hong Kong.)

The publisher of the fiercely independent, pro-democracy Apple Daily newspaper — effectively shut down by the government three years ago — owns hotels in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont., and has a twin sister and other family members here, son Sebastien noted this week on a stopover in Toronto. Sebastien himself says he has fond memories of visiting Canada as a child. This is where he learned English and attended summer camp in Ontario cottage country.

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But instead of fleeing the enclave when Beijing imposed a widely criticized national security law (NSL), arrested pro-democracy politicians and otherwise clamped down on free-wheeling Hong Kong, the elder Lai decided to stay.

The tycoon hoped to spare the paper’s journalists persecution by offering himself up as the face of Apple Daily, says Sebastien.

“He stayed to act as a lightning rod for these people. He knew that the Hong Kong government wanted heads, so to speak, or people in prison,” the son said in an interview.

“On one hand, I’m incredibly proud of him. I can’t really imagine how hard it is, the strength it takes to do this for 30 years, when you could very well argue that he could have had a much more comfortable life just bending the knee.”

The result of Lai remaining was shocking, but somewhat predictable. The publisher was arrested when 200 police officers raided Apple Daily in 2020 and has spent most of the last four years in prison, the most prominent victim of the crackdown. He’s in the midst of a trial on charges under the national security law, though it appears his chief offence was merely to loudly criticize Hong Kong’s rulers.

 

Kind of like here.

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Chong’s testimony that the person approached him about a year ago puts the timeline around the same time as when the Foreign Interference Commission was about to begin.

Commissioner Marie-Josée Hogue, in an interim report published in May, said interference had not impacted the overall results of the elections, but it could have played a role in some individual ridings. Hogue also identified China as the main culprit.

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Chinese government officials tried to influence Canadian MPs to vote against a 2021 motion condemning China’s genocide of Uyghurs and even looked to build “profiles” on certain parliamentarians after the vote.

That’s according to a summary of intelligence by Canadian security agencies and departments that was tabled at the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference (PIFI) on Wednesday.

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The document reveals that People’s Republic of China (PRC) officials made “initial” efforts to influence an unspecified number of MPs to vote against the motion recognizing the country’s treatment of its Uyghur and other Turkic Muslim minorities as “genocide.”

The motion ultimately passed unanimously in the House of Commons. But after the vote, the document states the PRC began efforts to “build profiles on a number of MPs” who supported the motion.

“This research may have informed the PRC’s decision to impose economic sanctions on some of those MPs or may have informed other actions,” reads the unclassified summary of intelligence produced for the inquiry.

Those were just some of the examples of suspected or confirmed foreign interference efforts by China against Canadian MPs brought up during Michael Chong’s testimony on Wednesday.

The Conservative MP also revealed that in October last year he was approached by an individual in the street offering him “political support, assistance with elections, and political advice here on (Parliament Hill),” he told the inquiry.

 

 

Perhaps you would like to detail the plans that got you released, hhhmm?:

Canadian Michael Kovrig and his girlfriend were walking home from dinner on Dec. 10, 2018.

They lived in Beijing, where Kovrig, a former diplomat, worked at an independent global think tank. As they took the final steps into their apartment, they were swarmed.

“I was grabbed out of the blue by about a dozen men in black. They stuffed me into a car and took me to a secret black jail and then proceeded to interrogate me relentlessly and hold me in solitary confinement,” he told Global News, sharing his story of incarceration and the aftermath.

The sit-down interview comes three years after he was released following 1,019 days in a Chinese detention cell. Kovrig is now sharing his story for the first time, including details of his two-and-a-half-year incarceration and meeting his daughter following his release.

He spoke of finding strength from the letters and cards he received from ordinary Canadians, and he warned Canada and its allies about the need to take foreign interference seriously.

 

Oh, that will never happen, sir:

Last Friday, Azam Ishmael admitted that he had not read the commission’s first report, detailing how China manipulated the 2019 Liberal nomination race in Don Valley West. That’s the riding where the Chinese consulate in Toronto paid for buses to ferry international students to vote for their preferred candidate, Han Dong, threatening them with visa revocation if they did not comply. That report noted that CSIS briefed a Liberal party representative with secret-level clearance several weeks after the nomination meeting, who then briefed the PM the next day.

While Ishmael, who became national director in 2017, said he has secret clearance and participated in the briefing, he told the inquiry — with a straight face — that until he was questioned by the commission, he hadn’t heard  that buses had been paid for by the People’s Republic of China, that the students had been told they could lose their visas if they didn’t vote for Dong, or that many students lived outside the riding and were ineligible to vote there. Ironically, in his initial interview by the commission in March 2024, Ishmael recommended that, “Caution should be taken when discussing potential foreign interference in Canada’s elections and democratic processes because sowing misinformation and/or distrust is easy and can effectively undermine an otherwise robust system” — one so robust that he apparently didn’t know what was going on in his own party.

 

 

In Canada, we call slave labour the TFWP:

Canadian border officials have intercepted more than 50 shipments of materials they suspected were made with forced labour, but most were ultimately let into the country and U.S. legislators say Canada needs to do more.

A group of U.S. legislators has called on Canada, the U.S. and Mexico to act to ensure goods made with forced labour, especially by Uyghurs in China’s Xinjiang region, don’t end up on North American shelves.

U.S. senators Jeff Merkley and Marco Rubio, alongside congressmen James McGovern and Chris Smith, wrote a letter to Trade Minister Mary Ng and her Mexican and U.S. counterparts calling on all three countries to take more aggressive action on slave-made goods.

(Sidebar: this Mary Ng.)

The U.S. legislators worked together to pass the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (UFLPA), which has U.S. Customs assume that goods made in the Xinjiang region are made with forced labour unless there is proof to the contrary.

In their letter to Ng, the group asked her to consider similar legislation in Canada.

“The UFLPA was created as a response to the government of the PRC’s policies of severe repression against Uyghurs and other Turkic peoples, which includes mandating that these people perform involuntary labor, in gross violation of internationally recognized human rights,” they wrote.

“This horrendous behavior has not abated. The law was also born out of a recognition that an additional enforcement mechanism was needed to ensure that U.S. agencies were able to comply with laws that prohibit import of goods made with forced labour.”

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Green technology supply chains are tainted by slave labour, the Commons trade committee was told yesterday. Chinese concentration camp inmates are forced to mine lithium and manufacture solar panels, one witness testified: “Uyghurs are being used as a source of slave labour.”

 Do the Swedes use Uyghur forced labour?

Don't let some kid's death ruin trade for us, Chinese minister asks Japan:

China’s top diplomat has urged Japan to “calmly” handle last week’s fatal stabbing of a Japanese schoolboy in the Chinese city of Shenzhen and “avoid politicizing or exaggerating the issue,” as Japan’s foreign minister demanded Beijing deal with “unfounded and malicious anti-Japanese” social media posts.

Beijing has been trying to prevent the stabbing of the 10-year-old boy, who was attacked on his way to a Japanese school, from spiraling into a wider diplomatic row between the Asian powers, characterizing it as a lone act and downplaying the political implications.

“China will investigate and handle the case of the attack on a Japanese student in Shenzhen in accordance with the law, and will, as always, protect the safety of all foreign citizens in China,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry quoted Wang Yi as telling his Japanese counterpart, Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa, during their 55-minute meeting at United Nations headquarters in New York on Monday.

Japan’s Foreign Ministry said that Kamikawa had “strongly demanded” that Beijing offer a clearer explanation of the facts surrounding the stabbing, including the motive behind the attack, while strictly punishing the perpetrator, who was arrested at the scene. The Chinese side has yet to offer details of the attacker’s motive.

Kamikawa also heaped pressure on Beijing to crack down on internet posts targeting Japan — though Chinese authorities are reportedly already censoring at least some online content that could stir up anti-Japanese sentiment.

“Malicious, anti-Japanese social media and internet posts, including those related to Japanese schools, are directly linked to the safety of children and are absolutely unacceptable,” Kamikawa said. “They must be thoroughly dealt with as soon as possible.”

The top Japanese diplomat also urged the neighbors to “work earnestly to improve the situation by squarely facing issues that serve as obstacles to the bilateral exchange," according to the Japanese Foreign Ministry.

The meeting followed similar talks between State Minister of Foreign Affairs Yoshifumi Tsuge and Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Sun Weidong in Beijing on Monday.

Although Beijing has claimed the attack was not politically motivated, it occurred last Wednesday — the 93rd anniversary of the Mukden Incident that led to Japan’s invasion of Manchuria. The anniversary is traditionally seen as a day of humiliation for Chinese, something the country’s ruling Communist Party has emphasized under its patriotic education system.

The boy’s murder was also the second violent incident targeting Japanese school students in China in less than three months. On June 24, a man attacked a Japanese school bus in the eastern city of Suzhou, killing a Chinese bus attendant who attempted to protect the students and injuring a Japanese woman and child.