cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11900959
cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/11900079
When [Canadian] Prime Minister Mark Carney stood in Beijing in January and said Canada’s new “strategic partnership” with China set both countries up for a “new world order,” it marked a striking reversal. Less than a year earlier, on the election campaign trail, Carney had named China as Canada’s biggest security threat. And a year before the trip, the Hogue Commission’s report on foreign interference concluded that China is the most persistent and sophisticated foreign interference threat to Canada’s democratic institutions and elections.
The deal cut China’s tariff on Canadian canola seed to about 15 percent from 75.8 percent and eased duties on peas, and seafood. In return, Ottawa agreed to let in 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) a year at a 6.1 percent tariff, down from 100 percent. The partnership also covers clean energy, multilateral co-operation, people-to-people ties, and public security, including an agreement between the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security, the police apparatus Beijing has used to monitor and intimidate its diaspora abroad.
The pivot comes as Carney rallies middle powers to band together against U.S. tariffs while moving closer to the world’s other superpower. Taiwan, which Beijing refuses to recognize as an independent country, and actively seeks to reunify Taiwan as part of China even by military force, shows how aggressive China can be. And as Chiense coast guard incursions into Taiwan-controlled waters have spiked in 2026, U.S. President Donald Trump has called a stalled $14-billion arms package for the island “a very good negotiating chip” with Beijing, recently adding he isn’t looking to fight a war thousands of miles away.
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Few Western journalists have watched China’s security apparatus as closely as Jürgen Kremb. A former Der Spiegel bureau chief in Beijing, Singapore, and Vienna who was expelled from China in 1998, he now teaches and conducts research at Soochow University in Taipei as a visiting scholar.
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The Hub spoke with Kremb about what Canada should learn from Taiwan as it grows its ties to China.
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Question: … Ottawa has now signed a strategic partnership with Beijing that includes a confidential RCMP agreement with China’s Ministry of Public Security. From where you sit in Taiwan, which has lived with this pressure far longer, does closer engagement with Beijing typically restrain its interference activities abroad, or does it give them more cover and access and embolden them?
Jürgen Kremb: It’s police and domestic security, and they work like the FBI. There are also members of their staff who work as agents, suppressing dissidents and different opinions. This ministry has about 2 million staff in China … and they open police stations in foreign countries, including Canada. The same in Europe and Australia [and other countries]. Of course that’s against the law of other countries, just as the U.S. or Canada cannot open a police station in Beijing.
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China now is the biggest threat to the security of a lot of countries, because they steal intellectual property, they intimidate their dissidents abroad, they intimidate people who are speaking out against China, they operate a lot of media. So we really have to take the threat seriously… And of course the primary target is Taiwan.
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Taiwan is the testing ground, [but it’s also being] executed against other democratic societies, the so-called West, but the so-called West also includes South Korea, Japan, Indonesia, etc.
Xi Jinping wants to rule the world–Western politicians simply cannot comprehend this. He wants to destroy the liberal concept of Western democracies because their very existence poses a threat to his dictatorship.
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Chinese cars are basically spies on four wheels. In Israel, in Sweden or Norway, and in Japan, Chinese cars are not allowed anymore into military installations because where there are cameras, they are actively spying on the surroundings and sending this data back to China.
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What happens if you work too closely with China? First, you seem to have access to a big, big market and make a lot of money. But one day it’s over, and your whole industry base collapses. So if Canada decides to go that way with closer relations to China, look twice and be very careful, and you could lose more than you gain.
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If you’re getting very close to China, in the end you might not be in the driver’s seat of your own country or of your key industry, because the Chinese sooner or later will overtake your products and influence your domestic policy.
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The most infuriating part about talking to people like yourself is the cherry picking of points that you feel able to respond to and the proud finish like you have proven something. Your responses are surface level and don’t stand any degree of scrutiny.
You say that professionals are still workers, while technically true, a doctor in Beijing making $150,000 and a factory worker or farmer making 7,500 a year are not a homogeneous group and certainly have different motivations and views on how society should be made up. Those on the top in any system will always resist change. As I mentioned in my previous comment, the CPC is dominated by the more highly paid professional workers.
So while you guys claim China is a beacon of communism you fail to disclose how early China is in the “transition” to true communism. You fail to mention there are different classes based on wealth, with the Hukou system being one of the factors along with the wage setting that bakes that into the system. The wealthy in China live very well on their high wages while the majority do not. These wealthy elites as I mentioned make up 2/3 of the CPC membership and use their power to enshrine their position in society. All the while the poor working majority are fed some bullshit about the wonderful path to communism they are on with the promised land just around the corner just out of reach. It’s just as much bullshit as the American dream. The wealthy will end up in control of China just as they have done in America because it is human nature.
You claim I am basing this claim on vibes but my claim has evidence, unlike the transition to communism. My claim is based on what has happened in every civilization we know of since history began. Society will always stratify, there will always be those that seek power and wealth. Society organises this way right down to the small scale. When Marx was coming up with his ideas there was no such thing as modern psychology. The promised land of full communism will never work because if you have no financial incentive to work cleaning toilets no one would do it. Similarly why would a doctor brilliant enough to hit the top of his field stay in a country that gives him the same pay as the toilet cleaner when his talents would give him a much better life anywhere else in the world?
My own country of Ireland was not an imperialist country and did not pilfer any countries of their surplus value. We enjoy some of the strongest social safety nets in the world and have much lower inequality that China, Ireland’s gini coefficient is .27, China’s is somewhere between .36 to .47. You lads are always unaware or try to hide the obvious fact that China has also been an imperial power for its entire history, their most recent acquisitions of Tibet in 1951 and Xinjiang (literally translates to "new region/territory) in 1949.
I did not reject economics as a science, I correctly stated that economics is a social or “soft science” like sociology, in contrast to the “hard sciences” of physics, chemistry or biology. Economics does use some scientific methods like statistical data, models and observation but does not have repeatable experiments or universal laws. My degree is in the hard sciences, but I do respect economics as a discipline when they are not trying to mascerade as a hard science.
So? Doesn’t make it a good or real trade union
You do not seem to understand what trade unions do, trade unions advocate for workers rights and provide a way for workers to collectively bargain with their employer. I don’t know how you think this lever can be used by capitalists to upset socialism. If anything the current system suits the current Chinese capitalist class. We all know that trade unions are an alternative power base for socialism that the ruling class won’t stand for. There you go again manipulating reality to suit your opinion.
Wages for workers have been going up in China, this looks impressive but when you take into account the extremely low starting point it is easy to “skyrocket” and they have not kept pace with GDP growth. The wage increase has also been more pronounced for the capitalists and the elites in China. China’s domestic consumption is also pitifully low and has remained low for years, despite what the government claims.
Interesting choice of language there refering to the site. Discussion of Tianemen Square or June 4th is heavily censored on China’s heavily censored version of the internet. Public or private memorial services for the victims are illegal on the mainland. Relatives of those killed are banned from visiting cemeteries around the 4th June. Activists, artists or citizens who attempt to bring up the crackdown are frequently arrested and charged with subversion and the annual candlelight vigyl At Victoria park in Hong Kong has now been outlawed with local activists being prosecuted. What are you lying for?
There are better places than a Lemmy comment to learn how economics has advanced in the last 150 years and one comment is not enough to explain to you all of the changes in that time. Those “new classes” I have brought up have very different motivations to the common worker and sit above them in the stratified system in operation currently in China. These people also hold 2/3 of the CCP membership and unless you are stupid and blind you should see how they benefit from the status quo. The promise of “real communism…someday…” Is the new opiate of the masses in modern China. It allows the oligarch class to keeps workers working long hours in awful conditions. You defend “communist China” while wealth inequality and structural wage-wealth gaps have continued to rise sharply in recent years. The recent slow economy and depressed property market has only exacerbated this. The Gini wealth coefficient has “skyrocketed”, to borrow your phrase, from .45 in 1995 to .70 in 2023. The top 10% in China capture 41% of income and hold 67% of the wealth. The bottom 50% get about 15% of the income. Marx would not approve. Your own personal bias and myopia has made you delusional.
For starters, I want to point out the farce you’re putting on by both making a mockery of Marxism, and yet acting as though you’re an authority on what Marxists actually believe. As you’ve admitted, you think communism is ridiculous, and as you’ve admitted elsewhere, you yourself are a colonizer that fled Hong Kong once the communists began to further integrate it with the mainland. You’re trying to hide behind your individual role as a colonizer by drawing on Irish history as a colony, a country with a rich history of Marxist thinkers like James Connolly, while simultaneously arguing against China’s socialist system as not being adequately Marxist. It’s a farce.
Regardless of your personal background, however, it’s important to address your claims as they are.
First, class. Not once did I ever say that class is homogenous. Classes are aggregates, of course doctors enjoy greater material benefits than other kinds of workers. The critical importance of them being the same class is that they both share a collective interest as a class, that interest being collectivization of production and distribution. As laborers, both have as an interest rising collectivization and socialization, whereas capitalists, both big and small, oppose this trend. Classes are bimodal, in the modern era proletarian and bourgeois, with each broad class having manifold striations. This does not mean variance within a class is sufficient to be a class of themselves.
The class makeup of the CPC is overwhelmingly proletarian. This is a fact. The types of workers that most occupy the CPC do tend to be more educated, and therefore make more money, it’s true, but this is not a bad thing. Again, as workers, they share the same class interest.
The working poor are not “fed some bullshit,” they are seeing the most rapid climbs in life metrics in history, and the most rapid development of their material wealth. Who cares if some few capitalists get wealthier if the whole of society prospers? If the marketized sector in China became an impediment to progress, this would be a deeply concerning situation, but Marxists are not moralists and do not oppose private property as a sin, but instead as something that plays a specific historic role and phases out of that role. The role of markets is to socialize production, the role of a socialist state is to collectivize socialized production and oppress capitalists from forming a cohesive political bloc.
Your arguments about “human nature” are, frankly, childish and absurd. Again, you make a mockery of yourself, thinking Marx never accounted for incentives. The comical idea of equal pay for everyone is a farce invented by liberals to discredit communists, the actual fact is that socialists suggest that pay be according to the work done until the productive forces are so advanced that it doesn’t matter anymore. From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, is a hypothesis of an era where production and distribution is so advanced that anyone, regardless of background, is sufficiently trained to perform any act of labor in society and thus all labor be interchangeable.
You then continue to embarrass yourself by claiming China has been an imperial power for its entire history, ignoring the century of humiliation when it was a colony, and ignoring colonial Hong Kong that you describe as “cool.” Further, you never actually establish that China is imperialist, you just say that Tibet and Xinjiang are part of China as though that’s enough to claim it imperialist. You have a great deal of work to prove imperialism, and annexing territory is not imperialism.
Regarding your discussion of “hard” and “soft” science, you evidently care for neither, considering how confidently you speak on subjects you do not care to learn about. If you want to actually critique Marxism, you should begin by learning what Marxists actually believe. You occupy a stance that despices Marxism and Marxists, while also trying to say Marxists aren’t true Marxists. It’s opportunist doublespeak.
Regarding trade unions, the All China Federation of Trade Unions is extremely effective at supporting worker rights. Time and time again, independent groups under the guise of supporting progressive causes have been CIA fronts designed to foment popular dissent. Independent trade unions therefore stand not against merely their own bosses, but the ACFTU and the unions a part of it.
The “interesting language” I use for Tian’anmen Square is spelling it correctly. Discussion of June 4th is not censored, repeating western atrocity mythos is. I’m not lying here, the ones that are persecuted are the ones that uplift the color revolution as a good thing, despite the fascist background of the CIA-planted leaders of the student movement.
You then drone on about inequality in China, but the central point is that marketization inevitably results in monopoly, and monopoly inevitably makes itself better as a part of planned economy than marketized. Markets prepare the basis of planned economy, so that’s how China is progressing. It isn’t a lengthy period of sacrifice for an eventual 180 pivot to communism, it’s a gradual process of constant improvement that results in higher degrees of socialization:
The absolute bare minimum you could do is read Socialism With Chinese Characteristics: a Concise Guide. It’s 50 pages long, and is the bare minimum you would need to begin to criticize China from a standpoint that understands their system from their perspective.
I never claimed to be an authority on Marxism, although I am flattered you think I am one. Marxism is an outdated economic philosophy that sounds lovely but has more plot holes than a Fast and Furious movie. I know enough about it to be sure that it would not work due to its ridiculous assumptions about society and human nature. Then there is you who holds Marxism up as a universal truth right up there with the Laws of Thermodynamics or the Theory of Relativity.
I was never a “coloniser” of Hong Kong, just an immigrant living in what was a fantastic international city with my wife whose parents are from there, along with her family that still live there. What an idiotic attempt to disparage me and then try and use that to disparage my own views on socialism as an Irish person.
This is another one of your fallacies, this is where theory and reality clash and you can’t handle it. The doctor on $150,000+ is not nearly as incentivised as the farmer/worker on $5000. The doctor is at the top end of society and would like to stay that way. If communism was fully implemented tomorrow the next day you will quickly find all the doctors have emigrated unless you build a wall to keep them in. We all know the Chinese government is not above targeting the families of dissident emigrants, what a great system of government, imagine how much worse this will have to get?
In your flawed opinion…
You sound an awful lot like a capitalist here!
Yes they are, as the factory owners steal their surplus labor.
Again, spoken like a true capitalist!
If my arguments are childish and absurd they should be easy to argue against. You don’t even try, resorting to ad hominem attacks, that’s low buddy. Marx did account for incentives, badly, especially in light of everything we have learned in the last 150 years regarding human psychology.
You discredit the “comical idea of equal pay” instead of realising that this is a simplified explanation of the end stage of communism. Once the productive forces are so advanced that pay is no longer required we are at a situation where regardless of your job you get the same as everyone else. As someone who worked hard to get a well paid job, I would be out of my country if they tried pull that bullshit on me. This is the competitive nature of humans, why does some lazy asshole deserve the same as me when I work my hole off?
So when all the brain surgeons leave, Larry the farmer out in the field can interchangeably perform the brain surgery. Do you even read what you are writing? The plot holes are everywhere. Modern society is so much more specialised now than in the days of Marx.
Again your lack of historical knowledge is showing, China was never fully colonised by the Europeans during the century of humiliation. The Japanese did colonise parts of China for a few years last century. This also does not invalidate the fact that China was an imperial power. Losing a war does not erase the past or future, China has been blobbing out across the map since it began in the heartland. Xinjiang and Tibet are two of China’s more recent colonial expansions where they are actively committing cultural genocide and locking up the local Uyghur population in “re-education” centres. As you point fingers at western colonialism, pay attention to the 3 fingers pointing back at yourself you hypocrite. “Annexing territory is not imperialism” sure buddy, the Chinese people just needed lebensraum right?
I do not despise Marxism, as I said before it is a noble idea and a good starting point, but absolutely unworkable in real life. I do despise fanatical modern Marxists in a similar way to religious fanatics because it takes over their whole world view and ego. When the plot holes are pointed out they tend to defend the indefensible because their whole world will crash down if they can no longer be a Marxist.
Which is why Chinese workers work in such shitty conditions with long hours and no work life balance? It is because the ruling party can accept no challenge to their absolute authoritarian control.
You have just contradicted yourself. Ceremonies rembering those that died in the heavy handed crackdown are a threat to the government.
This is the lie that is sold to placate the poor working class. Your great grandchildrens lives will be better if you just sacrifice for the good of the country. Wealth inequality in China has only been increasing rapidly in the last 30 years, this doesn’t sound like constant improvement to me? You say “workers wages have skyrocketed” this is true with the caveat that when you start from such a low starting point the initial gains are easy and look impressive in percentage terms, let’s see what happens now that the Chinese economy is slowing down and aging rapidly with increased global protectionism. My bet is the current trend in China of the wealthy getting wealthier will continue. I am not going to read your religious pamphlet and do not expect to convince you either because you have drank the kool aid of fundamentalism.