First I want to say a bit about the Burton report. I finally read the Burton report, after not seeing it for a long time and hearing all kinds of things about it, and actually first reading the transcript of your committee hearings. What's interesting is that the Burton report is a lot less critical and milder than were the comments made in the hearings by Burton.
When you read the Burton report, actually it makes a lot of sense. There are a lot of good things happening, but there are certain problems, and we have to deal with those problems. The problems are partly that we want to widen the participation base on both sides, focus discussion more, get clearer topics where we're not talking at each other but connecting to each other, perhaps find out whether DFAIT needs to be supplemented by some other organization as well, and on both sides get the ministries of foreign affairs out of it and so forth.
As I said, I came from a meeting of a couple of hours with the chargé d'affaires of the Chinese embassy, and I asked him about the human rights dialogue. I said “I'm going to testify about this soon. What's your view on this dialogue? Is it worthless? Do you want to continue it?” They were quite open and said, “We think this is a good thing. We learned a lot from Canada.” That's their view.
We can take that for what it's worth. This is an official talking, obviously, so other officials can hear. But basically they learned a lot from Canada. There are a numbers of areas where they profited by the Canadian experience. They think that if it is to resume again, there needs to be proper preparation here to define the topics more clearly. This was something that was useful for China, and they've had these dialogues with other countries; they're not useless to them. They have made a difference. That's their view. They didn't give me too many specific details.
From my point of view, I can't speak to the tangible results of this dialogue in China, since I wasn't a participant in it, but I can speak to what Raymond Chan said earlier, which is that there are tremendous changes that have taken place in a number of areas, whether it's opening up the capacity of China's parliament or whether it's opening up the party to be more transparent. In that case, we can talk to these people, we can actually talk to the top leaders of China on a fairly regular basis. We never could do that before.
Whether we can influence them so that they will do what we want them to do, that's another question. As the people in the embassy said today, “We don't want you to tell us what you want. We're not interested in you telling us what we should do in our country--that's our business--but we're willing to listen to you. And if you can help us to develop in certain areas, that's fine.”
The one point that really always strikes me is civil society. There's been tremendous opening up of civil society in China in different areas. The recent earthquake was an excellent example. You have people getting in their cars in Shanghai, driving 2,000 kilometres, and then using their precious cars that they don't let anybody ever get into because they're brand new, to chauffeur people back and forth to the earthquake sites. You have people donating huge sums of money to this. You have so many people going there, the blogs, the e-mails and everything; I get so much stuff from my Chinese students and everyone on this. This has been an extraordinary experience.
The media got opened up. It will shrink again. The regime is not going to allow the media to stay open like this for very long, but media openness, as somebody mentioned earlier, is a big change in China. It is more open. But it's certainly not like our media, although sometimes we have some problems with our media too. I get misquoted all the time in The Globe and Mail, but that's a whole other story.