Good evening.
I'd like to thank the Special Committee on the Canada-People's Republic of China Relationship for inviting me to testify this evening and participate in these very important discussions.
My contribution to the ongoing discussions will be rooted in my expertise in international relations in the Indo-Pacific region and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, in particular.
My opening remarks will focus on China's ambiguous relationship with the liberal international order, commonly known as the international rules-based order. In doing so, I will draw on considerations that are relatively consensual and fairly well established in foreign policy and defence analysis, but which I think are worth recalling because they offer useful insights about the future of our relations with China.
People, including policy-makers, tend to learn from past experience, and this typically informs how they are going to interpret information and events. People basically perceive what they expect, and their expectations—it is important to draw from what we know about the way policy-makers engage in foreign and defence policy—are not necessarily always accurate, especially if they're rooted in misleading analogies. This lesson we can draw from foreign policy analysis has important implications for how we approach our relationship with China.
For example, Chinese policy-makers will tend to expect China to be stigmatized or treated unfairly by the west in international fora, and they will behave accordingly. This means that sometimes we'll see behaviour on the part of Chinese actors in exploiting loopholes or advancing particular interpretations of the rules in a way that is self-interested. This is not particularly surprising behaviour, however, on the part of a great power.
We also see a tendency among western policy-makers to expect China to behave like other states, and particularly Russia, among other revisionist powers with values that have clashed with our own throughout history. Policy-makers in the west also typically expect that what China is doing in areas that it would consider to be its core interests means that it will seek to do the same in other regions of the world—for example, the Arctic—but we should be wary about a number of these analogies and whether they actually hold up.
Another lesson we can draw from foreign policy analysis is that people, including policy-makers, tend to see the actions of others as much more planned, centralized and coordinated than they actually are. That's even more so when reliable information is scarce and in the case of authoritarian states.
There is a tendency to assume that everything China does is part of a coherent long-term plan or grand strategy, when in fact it is as likely to be the result of a disaggregate set of ad hoc uncoordinated decisions from individuals and groups with competing interests, preferences and world views.
While it is obvious that we should be concerned about the growing centralization of power in China, this doesn't mean other interest groups within the domestic politics ecosystem do not have various interests and preferences when it comes to China's pushing for a more assertive position in the international sphere.
People, including policy-makers, also fear what they do not know. Those are typically the unknown unknowns, so the fact that we don't know China's true intentions or China's true motives will typically lead to speculation, to assuming the worst in virtually every domain of China where we observe China's behaviour that can be a source of concern. This can lead, however, to confirmation bias being built into policy and potentially also to implications in terms of self-fulfilling prophecy that we should be mindful of.
I'm not sure we can ever know, to be honest, what China's true intentions are, and this is for a number of reasons. Again, China, is not a black box.
I don't think, either, that the intentions of policy-makers are as clear or coherent as we think they are, and finally, motives and intentions typically change over time according to evolving circumstances.
This underlines the importance of supporting sound country expertise on China and Canada with knowledge of developments in domestic politics.