Canada-China Relations Committee on Feb. 24th, 2020

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you very much, Mr. Fragiskatos.

Mr. Bergeron.

[Stéphane Bergeron, Bloc, Montarville, QC]

Mr. Chairman, I would like to thank our witnesses very much for their presentations, which I found extremely enlightening.

Mr. Burton deplored the fact that he certainly had other points to address and other contributions to make.

I invite our witnesses to feel free to send us any comments or observations they may have on any topic at a later date. Their contribution can be most enlightening to our committee.

I'm trying to summarize everything we've heard from our witnesses, and I've identified four main themes.

First, the mythical era of China-Canada relations based on friendship, collaboration, missionaries, Norman Bethune, Canadian wheat and Canada's recognition of the People's Republic of China before the United States, is over. We are in a new phase.

Secondly, China is obviously a growing power, and it places a value on power or aspiration to power.

Third, therefore, Canada should take a more determined approach and show more firmness towards the government of the People's Republic of China.

Fourth and finally, Canada should try to develop a multilateral response to China's actions in violation of the international rules currently in effect which do not seem to be respected in any way by the Chinese authorities.

In trying to sum up in these four points that you've presented to us, did I do a good reading of what you tried to bring to our attention this morning?

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Who is the question for?

[Stéphane Bergeron, Bloc, Montarville, QC]

I am putting it to anyone who wants to answer it.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

I guess I'll ask the witnesses. You're probably all interested in answering this. Just to be sure, would you like to raise your hands, if you're interested in answering it?

I see Mr. Burton first.

[Dr. Charles Burton]

Absolutely, Mr. Bergeron, absolutely.

It has always impressed me how effective members of the Parti Québecois are in these committees, and I thank you for that. I also have taken on your suggestion that more materials could be sent to the committee, and I will be honoured to provide those things.

I agree with you on all these points that you have raised, which are basically summarizing what I've said. I think it's important that Canada not try to do this alone with China. If we can come up with some consensus, that would be wonderful.

The countries that I find have the best knowledge of communism, including that of the Russians and the Chinese, are countries in eastern Europe, such as the Czech Republic, Poland, Lithuania and so on. These countries understand how these kinds of hegemonic powers work, and I would encourage us to draw broadly on the countries we seek to ally with to try to come up with some way to preserve what's good in our Canadian values and in the way we engage in foreign policy.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Thank you.

Mr. Evans.

[Prof. Paul Evans]

Mr. Bergeron's question and his summary are intriguing in several ways, and each of the points is going to need to be fleshed in more fully as the committee proceeds with its discussions.

I would raise just a possible addition to the fourth point that he raised, about China as an international actor. We have to be realistic that there are certain things China does that we don't like. There are certain kinds of policies that it pursues that anger its neighbours and others. Overall, however, China's involvement in the international system, I would suggest, is in fact stabilizing rather than destabilizing.

On balance, in most of the international institutions in which it operates—in most of the ones that it has created but also the western organizations that have been put in place—China responds and plays a responsible game. It has benefited from the global order that we all put together, with the United States' leadership. In several areas it is trying to be the anchor to that order rather than the destabilizer.

Some of the other witnesses will talk about this in more detail, but we can't frame China exclusively as an outlier or as a threat. In the main, it has been a responsible international citizen.

Is that changing? Will it change in future? We're all worried, but at the moment we have to put it into that perspective.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Mr. Calvert, I didn't see your hand up so I will go back—

Oh, yes, you did raise it. Pardon me.

[Phil Calvert]

I did raise it. Sorry.

I wanted to follow up a bit with something I think I said perhaps not very clearly in my opening statement, which is that any attempt to define China, very simply to label China, as this kind of actor or that kind of actor misses a much more complex story about how it performs internationally. That's not limited to just China, but it is particularly evident in China.

In some organizations, as Professor Evans has said, it is a stabilizing influence. In other organizations or other activities, we find its activities and actions less than helpful.

I think it has to go back to what China itself sees as how it will benefit. If it will benefit from stability in an organization, if it will benefit geopolitically from assuming a leadership role in an organization, and especially organizations from which the United States has retreated, then it serves its own interests.

One of the things I've learned about China is that there are no simple answers to any questions you ask about it, and this is another one of those questions.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Mr. Harris.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to the witnesses for your very informative comments.

Professor Evans, your comments about the international order and China's place in it reflect to some extent the United Kingdom House of Commons report of last April, which says that China's foreign policy goals primarily are designed to protect its domestic political systems, which I think we have heard from Mr. Burton as well.

They underscore that by saying it doesn't want to change the international world order as such, but it is more interested in showing that its own domestic policies are not challenged. They say that Chinese domestic politics cannot be treated as if it were separate from foreign policy, and the U.K. must adjust its approach to China accordingly. What that means in practice I think they say later on in the report, which I will ask another question on afterwards.

Given that, do you agree with that assessment, that they are not out to change the world in their own image but rather to make sure that their system is prevailing, and perhaps that's a key to understanding what they do internationally?

[Prof. Paul Evans]

China isn't alone as a great power trying to protect its own international interests and its own value structure in its own country, its own sovereignty. China in that sense is acting in many ways like great powers that we have known in the past and probably will know in the future.

The idea that China has an absolutely clear conception of what it wants a world order to look like is a little misleading. I think there are different strands that we see in Chinese behaviour and attitudes that suggest they don't have a single vision of what they want.

They do have certain immediate interests. They want to defend them. They want to protect them. They also want to keep globalization alive and moving forward. They have benefited from it, and on balance it's in their interests, but the challenge with China is that in 80% of activities it's a responsible actor. There are things they want to change. Those are mainly around issues related to human rights and democracy promotion, which they feel are antithetical to their interests. So yes, China is a defender of a world order, an international order, but not a defender of a liberal international order.

Something that is very difficult for many of us is that many countries are supportive of China's general approach in this. The balance away from the liberal democracies and the world order, as we understood it, is happening and in part because the United States is stepping away from it as well. These are turbulent times for everyone.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

I have a lot of questions, frankly, but this one I would ask all of you to comment on, again going back to the U.K. House of Commons, which studied this recently. We have talked about the different aspects of policy, Mr. Burton's views being starkly different from some of the others, but at the end it urged the U.K. government to produce a single detailed public document defining the U.K.'s China strategy.

Is that something that is realistic to expect a government like Canada to do? In these circumstances, how do we reconcile the suggestion by Mr. Burton that we should take a very hard line, risk any trade with China, and on the other hand seek to engage China in working with the issues of climate change and others that we have a collective interest in?

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Mr. Harris, I'm going to have to ask you to indicate who you'd like to...because the time remaining is less than two minutes.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Mr. Burton, perhaps you could answer first.

[Dr. Charles Burton]

Everyone talks about how this is complex or complicated, but the fact is that General Secretary Xi Jinping's plan is clear. It's what's referred to as the two centenary goals: achievement of elimination of poverty by the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Chinese Communist Party, which was in 1921—so next year— and achieving a middle-class society by 2035; and then, by the 100th anniversary of the People's Republic of China, which would be 2049—but actually they use 2050—China would become the dominant power on the planet, the belt and road initiative will be achieved and that the institutions will adopt this community of the common destiny of mankind. I think that's clear.

In terms of your other one, do I like the idea that we should be absolutely honest and open and frank and transparent about how we plan to engage in our foreign policy toward the People's Republic of China? Yes, I do believe that it's better not to have secret unknown plans or anything. We should lay it out on the line. We stand for liberal democracy. Paul said that the new world order will not be a liberal world order. I don't want to live in a world that's not a liberal world order.

[Jack Harris, NDP, St. John's East, NL]

Do you want to say yea or nay from Singapore? Could you tell us whether you think having a defined policy is a good idea?

[Prof. Paul Evans]

Many of us have claimed for a long time that we need a China policy. I think that what this committee can do is help us set out what the basic theme or melody might be in that relationship. I suggested “engagement 2.0” or “co-existing with China”. The Americans and some other countries have set out recent approaches. The Americans' is this adversarial one. Australia's is more nuanced.

We're at a moment where clarity is needed but is going to be extremely difficult to construct. That's why we have such wonderful representatives in Ottawa as our members of Parliament.

[The Chair, Liberal, Geoff Regan]

Aren't you nice. You're buttering us up.

We will go on to the second round with five minutes each.

Mr. Williamson.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

Thank you Chairman, and thank you to all our witnesses for being here today.

I'm going to build a little bit upon some of the remarks that Mr. Bergeron made. What struck me from the testimony was, to some slight degree, everyone seemed to agree that we can't go back. There is no going back to a normal relationship with China, as a result of what has taken place over the last number of years and months, as well as because of a changing and different China.

Someone mentioned this, and I'll come back to this. It seems we made a bet over the last generation that we would work to end China's isolation by granting the country most favoured nation status as a way to bring it into the international order and then, after that, into the World Trade Organization. I think I read at one point that even Margaret Thatcher's gamble on Hong Kong was to hand the territory back to mainland China in the hope that it would spark a more liberal approach to its politics, which of course, unfortunately, has not happened.

We are a liberal democracy. China is not, and if anything, it is reverting further away from us, so if what we're seeing is not working, and if the bet has not paid off, it would seem to me that the position of.... What struck me is that your comments run counter to what I hear from official Ottawa—from the Government of Canada policy—both from the ambassador, as well as ranking government officials. Is that correct? If you could maybe all limit your comments to a minute, I'd appreciate it.

Mr. Burton, why don't you start since you're right here?

[Dr. Charles Burton]

Yes. I agree. I don't think that our current policy is sufficiently aware of the necessity for Canada to try to stand up for our own values in our engagement with China, in the overall interest of the future of the world.

The question is why it is that so many key policy-makers seem to be reluctant to engage with China in an honest and forceful way. Are some of these people, in fact, to some extent under the influence of Canadian businesses with interests in China, or do they for other reasons adopt positions that mean that they're supporting a policy of engaging with China on Chinese PRC terms?

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

I believe Mr. Calvert also put his hand up.

[Phil Calvert]

With respect to previous policies of supporting China's international growth in acceding to organizations like the WTO, maybe some politicians thought that China joining the WTO would bring about liberal democracy. Negotiators didn't. I think what we hoped for from this was perhaps a somewhat better system of commercial law. China's accession to the WTO has benefited both sides. It has benefited companies in the sense of reduced tariffs. While we're not completely happy with how China implements or doesn't implement some of its obligations, it has substantially changed China's trading system—if you compare it to the way it was in 2000 and then the way it was afterwards—in a positive way.

I wouldn't agree with your statement. When we say we can't go back to the way it was before, it doesn't mean we don't want to engage China in some new way. We need to work with China and its presence in the international community. Yes, we have to be firm, but we have to be intelligent about how we engage China and choose where our interests lie and where we can work with China internationally and where we collide with our interests.

In the case of human rights, if we're going to articulate human rights concerns, lecturing is not effective. It sometimes is necessary, but we should be also giving a business case for it.

[John Williamson, Conservative, New Brunswick Southwest, NB]

That's fair enough, but I'm curious. Would you agree, then, that continuing to ratchet up—or the path we're on—is not the way to go? For example, we have worked to bring China into what I will call the international economic order, the WTO. The next step would be a free trade agreement with China, which would, of course, deepen those ties. Do you think that is the next step, or should we be very wary of entering into a free trade agreement with a country that is known to steal technology and is, frankly, not a market-oriented player in its outlook of economics in the way Canada and other western countries are?