Evidence of meeting #25 for Foreign Affairs and International Development in the 39th Parliament, 2nd Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was burton.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4 p.m.
Liberal
4 p.m.
Bloc
4 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
Good day.
It's nice to see you again. We just met last night.
4 p.m.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
For my colleagues' information, yesterday I attended a conference given by Mr. Burton at the University of Ottawa. His presentation was very warmly received.
I find myself listening to you again this afternoon and I could sit here for hours because your stories are so very interesting. Your knowledge of China is extremely valuable, especially in this day and age. As a member of the Canada-Tibet Committee, I am leaving tomorrow for Michigan where I will be conveying Canada's support for his Holiness the Dalai Lama.
You noted that all of the bilateral meetings that had taken place between 1997 and 2005 had not produced the hoped-for results. One of the reasons is the understanding of dialogue entails.
Did I understand you correctly?
4:05 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
I think that from the Canadian point of view we hope to have results.
When I was working in the Canadian embassy in 1998, I was very optimistic about these dialogues. I thought this was great, that once the Chinese knew about democracy and human rights they would want that for themselves and we'd help them to make the institutional changes. I had good feelings. But as the dialogues went on year after year and we were getting nowhere, and the people we were meeting were defending the Chinese status quo, I began to realize that this activity was not working out the way we had hoped.
I think that from that point of view, seeing as this hasn't been working well, we want to use our resources in ways that will bring about good results. So we should wind this up and try other methods of encouraging democracy and human rights in China.
4:05 p.m.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
From what I see, Canada has very strong trade relations with China and adequate diplomatic relations. Through CIDA programming, Canada provides aid to China on the ground. I sense that each component is compartmentalized, rather than combined with other components, which could open up relations with China.
Would I be wrong to say that every aspect is compartmentalized at this point?
4:05 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
Well, I think the Chinese authorities would certainly like to keep human rights in a separate compartment and away from other aspects of the relationship.
It is troubling when one sees recently retired members of government engaging in business with Chinese Communist business networks and becoming suddenly quite wealthy. You wonder if there's any connection between their former activities in government and their subsequent wealth when they leave government, but one isn't privy to how those dynamics work.
I do think that in our relationship with China we should be looking at an all-of-government approach. Parliament is responsible for all of government, so I think it's incumbent on Parliament to be directing the government and the ministries in how to coordinate a Canadian approach to China that doesn't have this perceived conflict between social issues and trade issues. I don't think our government's speaking out on human rights has had any impact on our trade; our share of the Chinese market has been declining throughout the years of the Liberal government. It wasn't as if it was since the new government came in. We've had this problem of losing market share during the period of quiet diplomacy. In recent times we're doing a bit better, but I think it's due to commodity prices going up.
In China our government, in my view, has generally not been as effective as those of Australia, Britain, and the United States, because there are issues in the way we've been approaching China that have not been doing the best that could be done for Canada.
4:05 p.m.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
When we meet with witnesses like yourself, we try and look at Rights & Democracy. Human Rights Watch and Rights & Democracy are two organizations that you are familiar with and that you work with.
In a 2005 report on Canada's bilateral human rights dialogue with China, Rights & Democracy stated that any attempt to evaluate this dialogue must also take into account the relationship between bilateral dialogue and other diplomatic, trade and development strategies. The report also points to the importance of considering other solutions, if bilateral dialogue fails to achieve stated human rights objectives.
The solution advocated was the development of a genuine foreign affairs policy. Canada does not have such a policy.
How do you feel about that?
4:05 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
With regard to the dialogue, if the Chinese want to continue in this way, we could say we'll consider talking about the dialogue when you allow international observers into Tibet. Louise Arbour asked to go there and was turned down. That's one thing.
We do have a strategic partnership with China at the deputy minister level, and I would like to see the human rights issue become integrated into this strategic partnership and not left aside. Why do we have a strategic partnership in those issues while we're doing human rights in a separate process?
4:10 p.m.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
You said we had strategic partnerships. The human rights dialogue is a separate process not included in these strategic partnerships.
Is that in fact what you are saying?
4:10 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
In fact, yes, that's right.
4:10 p.m.
Bloc
Diane Bourgeois Bloc Terrebonne—Blainville, QC
Thank you very much.
You have just knocked me for a loop!
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Kevin Sorenson
Thank you, Madame Bourgeois. We'll now move to the government side, and Mr. Obhrai.
4:10 p.m.
Conservative
Deepak Obhrai Conservative Calgary East, AB
Thank you, monsieur.
First of all, I would like to correct my friend on the other side. We are not here to beat on China; we are here to discuss how best we can work there in China. We do have concerns with China, about human rights in reference to its treatment of its minorities, whether there are 53 or not.
About this question of whether they're Chinese or not, it is for the Chinese people and the government to decide how they want to treat their minorities. It's not for Canada to decide that. It's like we have the French Canadians over here and how we treat our minorities. So saying this would be a little bit going off track.
You're absolutely right that the manifestation of what is happening with the Tibetan protest and everything else is just one of the internal affairs of what is happening in China and how they're treating it. My friend over there was secretary of state for many years, doing this dialogue, which is what he does, and I agreed with him when he said there were a lot of human rights issues that we need to address. And that's what we are talking about here.
Nobody is talking about China's economic strength. Nobody is talking about China having done remarkably well and taken its people out.... It's an emerging economy that everybody is engaged in. But we cannot close our eyes to other Canadian values that we hold very strongly. This manifestation of this Tibetan protest is about how China is treating itself. If they did it more....
You have rightly pointed out about human rights, frankly speaking, that it has failed during the regime of this government. The reason it has failed is that we have taken a soft approach. At a given time, I was with Prime Minister Martin in China. I think you were there with me too. The Chinese were just totally blank, and said, “Don't talk about human rights here, period.”
The question I have is, what changes in society will occur in China in reference to a very vibrant Chinese community living in Taiwan, with the same language and everything, which is absolutely free with a tremendous amount of cultural freedom and religious freedom and which is a 1,000-year-old Chinese civilization? You can see that happening in Taiwan. You can see it happening in Hong Kong, if you want to go to Hong Kong.
Then you jump over to Beijing, and boom, everything is controlled. Yet there are these two countries, whether you want to call them countries, territories, or whatever—eventually it'll be decided. Its influence of that society and to a major degree influence by Chinese Canadians out here....
How much more quickly can this work on the current Chinese system out here to enable those changes to take place within China? We can stand outside, as we've done and as I think you've rightly said, but within China, how quickly can the change occur? How quickly would the big war around Tiananmen Square, or whatever...? How quickly can that be done, considering it's an emerging market? What's your view on that?
4:10 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
I'd say, first of all, in terms of our diplomacy with China, we have relations with the People's Republic of China, the government in Beijing, and we recognize all the territory that they control. There's some territory that they're not in control of, such as some offshore islands that they claim, and also Taiwan, which is one of these classic ethnic conflicts where you have two interpretations of history over the same piece of territory.
The Taiwanese education system says that Taiwan has never been a part of China. It was only temporarily under Chinese rule over a short period, but it was a Japanese colony and left alone and so on. The Chinese government is absolutely firm that Taiwan is a province of China and part of China's sacred continent.
Tibet is a similar situation. There are competing interpretations of the Tibetan history as to whether the Chinese are acting, in effect, in a colonial situation there or whether Tibet has always been part of China.
My own view is that Canada should not have an opinion on this. Mr. Bernier did make a statement referring to a one-China policy in a speech to the Asian heads of mission a couple of weeks ago, which he then repeated in answering a question in the House of Commons. The next day the New China News Agency issued a press release applauding our policy. As far as I know, China does not have a one-Canada policy.
These matters are within the domestic jurisdiction. We deal with the people who are in control of the territory, but I don't think it's appropriate for us to have an opinion as to the exact status of Taiwan or the exact status of claims of people about Tibet or about Mongolia or about whether it's Xinjiang or Turkestan. These are domestic affairs that are not within Canada's rights as a diplomatic partner to.... It would be interference in their domestic affairs if we came out strongly one way or the other.
But we can hold them to human rights, because we're all signatory to the same human rights covenants and expect that the Chinese government will respect them the same way as Canada does. We both give up some sovereignty when we subscribe to international agreements.
In terms of the pace of change in China, right now there's no alternative to the existing Communist Party to assume power there. There's no opposition. There's no Solidarity, as there was in Poland. There's no equivalent to what happened in the Czech Republic. The Chinese Communist Party is really, one might say, the only game in town. So I expect that the only thing that will lead to real effective change in China will be either a crisis or the perception of a crisis that the situation is about to lead to fragmentation of the state.
I think we should be engaging China on human rights. I think there should be a judicious balance between engagement and speaking out honestly about our concerns. But ultimately, the political situation in China will be determined by Chinese people, not by Canadians somehow directing change in that country.
4:15 p.m.
Conservative
4:15 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
I used to think that as the economy developed and as you got a rising middle class who owned property, they would want to have the right to participate in political decisions affecting their property. This is a normal political science idea. But what you're seeing in China, it seems to me, is nothing like this. The middle class appears to have been co-opted by the power and business, the Chinese Community Party, and maybe they realize that if there was effective democratic change in China and the vast majority of the population were empowered with democratic rights of citizenship and a notice of entitlement to rights, this would affect their privileged position.
So it seems the situation in China is quite stable, but there are a lot of people underneath who are feeling unhappy and not seeing the benefits of the amazing economic transformation reaching them in a meaningful way. As those people gradually become more enriched, I expect they will become more and more dissatisfied with the existing political arrangements, and one could see people's movements forming. But I don't see any indication of this in any foreseeable future, frankly, I'm sorry to say.
4:15 p.m.
Conservative
4:15 p.m.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
Thank you.
And thank you to Mr. Burton for coming on fairly short notice. I appreciate your being here today.
Where to start? I want to start with the idea of democracy and its evolution. I know that at the local level they have this kind of process for open recommendation and selection. There actually have been cases where non-Communist Party representatives have been recommended and selected. When you read the literature, they'll say that there is development and democracy here. Yet when you actually look at the evidence, to say that it's a groundswell and there's a trend to move to multi-party and to other levels of governance, it doesn't seem to be the case.
So on the one hand you could say—and I know the Chinese will say this— fine, how long have we been around, and how long did it take to formulate and have democracy evolve in the United States, or for that matter in Canada? Take the example of women having the vote here in Canada, or of aboriginal people--there are many arguments they can throw.
What I'd like to know from you is where the possibilities are in terms of supporting, in any constructive way, democratic development in China. Maybe it's not possible. I find it interesting that on the one hand--and I think we all do it--people will point the finger at China and say they're not doing this, this, and this. Yet we're all entirely complicit if you look at trade. Presently, if you look at most of the debt that the United States has, there wouldn't have to be a war between China and the United States: they would just have to call their debt. It's interesting to observe that on the one hand, when it's convenient, we can say that they're not observing human rights and not supporting democratic development. On the other hand, we're happy to truck and trade with them because it benefits us in some way.
Within that interesting dichotomy, how do we, or can we, support democratic development? At the grassroots level I've suggested there's non-Communist Party selection. Anyone could say that's a good thing. Are there ways we can actually support democratic development in China today?
4:20 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
I think there are. Certainly I was a big fan of the village elections when they came out 10 years ago. I thought this was going to empower people with a sense of citizenship and then they'd start electing at higher levels, and by about 2008 we'd have a democratic system in China. It turns out, as with most of my predictions about Chinese politics over the past 30 years, that I was wrong again. The village elections stopped at the village level, and the effective power was still in the hands of the non-elected Chinese Communist Party secretary. It's not very meaningful and hasn't led to citizenship.
But we do have important programs: CIDA, the civil society program, which is supposed to assist the development of the NGO sector in China. It's difficult to do, because most NGOs in China don't have proper legal status. We can do these programs like trying to train Chinese judges, developing a sense of transnational identity for professionals, so that the police want to do policing in accordance with international standards, so they don't see themselves just as Chinese police but see themselves as modern police who have colleagues in many countries. There are a lot of areas in which we can try to do a bit of value-added to promote human rights.
I don't like the parliamentary exchange, frankly, because the National People's Congress is not anything like the Parliament of Canada. When you go there, in effect you're establishing a sort of moral equivalence: we're all parliamentarians together; you have a different kind of parliament from ours. I think we should be careful in activities that provide some credibility to Chinese institutions that don't really deserve it.
4:20 p.m.
NDP
Paul Dewar NDP Ottawa Centre, ON
This is actually a fairly recent--January, February 2008--Foreign Affairs article, mostly dedicated to China, by John L. Thornton on what's happening in China in terms of democratic development.
In his article, he cites an article that was written, and he finds it interesting that this was actually in a periodical that was supported by the party, and that was widely read. The title is “Democracy is a Good Thing”. As he says here, it “caused a small sensation in China.” It got around. The author was Yu Keping, who is the head of a think tank. He says here that, “Yu was forthright and specific in his approval” of the concept of democracy, and he quotes: “Among all the political systems that have been invented and implemented, democracy is the one with the least number of flaws. That is to say, relatively speaking, democracy is the best political system for humankind.” I'm not sure we would have seen that distributed widely 20 years ago.
So my question is again on the engagement. I know there are exchanges among academics. In fact, a friend of mine who is here at the University of Ottawa recently had an exchange of a professor from China here with him and he's going there.
Talking about the judiciary--I know it's cited here as well that there are concerns--have we engaged in the past in programs that have had our judicial experts go to China and engage in any programs? If so, are we still doing that, to your knowledge?
April 17th, 2008 / 4:25 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
When I was working in the Canadian embassy, I remember welcoming the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to China, and she spoke to senior judges there. We have a senior judges training program. I don't think it worked out quite as we'd hoped. A lot of those judges ceased to become judges and sought refugee status in Canada or joined Canadian law firms.
4:25 p.m.
Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Brock University, As an Individual
The program was at the University of Montreal. I've been involved in a program at the Central Party School in Beijing. It's their main think tank for the party. I find that the colleagues I'm interacting with fully support the idea of separation of powers and the rule of law. They recognize this as the best system. But they also recognize that they can't have it in China, because it would undercut the existing rule of the party.
These people are supposed to be providing legitimation for Marxism under market economies in the 21st century. The party would like them to come up with some convincing explanation as to why they're legitimately in charge of the People's Republic of China. They haven't been able to do that. They admire our system, but then they realize that they can't have it in China. I see a sort of tension there between their aspiration and the hard realities of power that currently exist there.
