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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Famine was ended via collectivization and industrialization, well before “market incentives” were introduced. The market wasn’t necessary, industrial equipment was. Also, “empires,” lmao.
As for centralization, I’m 100% award that market economies trend towards centralization. That’s my point. I’m confused what you think I’m trying to say, here.
As for your adventure in Hong Kong, you’re incredibly defensive of British colonialism and see anti-colonialism as China going back on promises to colonizers. This is ridiculous, lmao.
As for the definitions you provided, they are woefully underdeveloped and simplistic. Imperialism and colonialism are predicated on extraction, not mere influence, and an empire is necessarily a country that does imperialism. Extracting resources is not colonialism or imperialism. The limits of your definitions are immediately apparent. What’s important is the elimination of sovereignty, and the extraction of surplus value. There is no cultural erasure in Xinjiang nor Tibet.
As for your lies about sterilization, they come from Adrian Zenz, Christian nationalist and professional propagandist for the Victims of Communism Foundation, does. Zenz’ work has been thoroughly discredited, yet is supported by western media for its utility in fearmongering. An example is lying about 8.7% of new IUDs as 80%, to back up claims of “forced sterilization,” from this chart:
You get onto me for providing a source that links almost entirely western news sources when available, and has fact checked information, while talking about claims from Adrian Zenz and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation? Hilarious. I recommend actually reading the UN report as well as (especially) China’s response to it, which eclipses it in size and detail. These are the most relevant accusations and responses without delving into straight up fantasy like Adrian Zenz.
Please, be serious.
You have gotten awfully quiet with your denials of forced labor.
Incorrect, the collectivisation happened first and the massive famines followed, 15-45 million dead in China, 5.7-8.7 million dead in the Soviet Union.
What does 100% award mean? I’m also confused. What I am trying to say is that you are extrapolating the tenancy of business to monopolise in free market economies to mean that centralisation in controlled state authoritarian societies will yield the same efficiencies.
No I am not and I never set foot in Hong Kong during the colonial period.
No I see it as going back on the promises to the people of Hong Kong. I still have family that lived there as well as family who had to flee to avoid persecution. Before you say it, they are all native Chinese.
You can’t even stay consistent in the same paragraph, how many times in our discussion have you contradicted yourself and fallen flat on your face?
The UN report you provided directly contradicts this, the master of contradiction strikes again! You make this too easy, I’m starting to lose interest in you.
I have a range from several reports, not one figure from a chap I have never even heard of.
No, I disputed your Chinese think tank source.
I did, you obviously didn’t.
242 Data from the 2020 Chinese Statistical Yearbook, covering 2019, shows that in the space of two years the birth rate in Xinjiang dropped approximately 48.7 per cent, from 15.88 per thousand in 2017 to 8.14 per thousand in 2019. The average for all of China is 10.48 per thousand.243
Uyghur-majority areas represented the bulk of this decline, with two of the largest Uyghur prefectures especially affected by it. In Hotan, which is 96 per cent Uyghur,245 birth rates went from 20.94 per cent in 2016246 to 8.58 per cent per thousand births in 2018.247 Similarly, the birth rate in Kashgar, which is approximately 92.6 per cent Uyghur,248 dropped from 18.19 per cent in 2016249 to 7.94 per cent per thousand births in 2018.250 Even taking into account the overall decline in birth rates in China,251 these figures remain unusual and stark. The same applies to the figures regarding sterilisations and IUD placements in XUAR, with official data indicating an unusually sharp rise in both forms of procedures in the region during 2017 and 2018, in comparison with the rest of China.252 For example, in 2018, sterilisations in XUAR stood at 243 per 100,000 inhabitants, whereas the overall figure for China was a fraction thereof at only 32.1 per 100,000 inhabitants.253
Several women interviewed by OHCHR raised allegations of forced birth control, in particular forced IUD placements and possible forced sterilisations with respect to Uyghur and ethnic Kazakh women. Some women spoke of the risk of harsh punishments including “internment” or “imprisonment” for violations of the family planning policy. Among these, OHCHR interviewed some women who said they were forced to have abortions or forced to have IUDs inserted, after having reached the permitted number of children under the family planning policy.259 These first-hand accounts, although limited in number, are considered credible.
Next time read the source before you once again make a fool of yourself. I will not bother with the Chinese report because China says China is innocent does not hold any weight to anyone with a shred of intelligence or integrity. You are being intellectually dishonest for even suggesting this, the USA also disputes the civilian death tolls in Iraq and Afghanistan, do you accept them at their word?
You have done nothing to convince me that you are anything more than a biased imperial boot licker. I have come to the conclusion over the last few years that there are plenty of weak minded people out there that need a strong authoritarian daddy figure to tell them what to do. Xi, Putin, Trump, Netenyahu etc. have made their bases unquestionably obedient and infantilised. You keep on defending the demonstrably indefensible to the point where you just look like a fool. You have zero ability to think critically, trying to feed me biased state propaganda to counter independent UN reports (China even sits as a permanent member of the security council FFS). You are not an honest actor but a biased brainwashed stooge. You imperial apologists are a major part of everything that is wrong with this world, enabling all of the misery in this world from Algeria to Afghanistan, Tibet to Timbuktu. You think that your colonialism is somehow different because it is the colonialism your “team” is perpetrating. I am Irish, I understand colonialism in all its forms, we were one of the original testing grounds. To quote another Irishman, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”.